Snooker: Chawla, Kothari qualify for final leg

Kamal Chawla, along with Sourav Kothari, Varun Kumar and Pushpender Singh, Tuesday advanced to the final round of the qualifying competition ahead of the World Snooker Indian Open tournament to be held in New Delhi Oct 14-18.

The four from Bangalore will be joined by the quartet of Lucky Vatnani, Sundeep Gulati, Manish Jain and Faisal Khan who had qualified from a similar competition held in New Delhi last week.

On conclusion of the third leg of the qualifying competition, where the eight qualifiers will be pitted against India's top eight ranked cueists, six Indians will eventually advance to the main draw of the tournament that has attracted some of World's top snooker stars.

The results:

Round 5 (winners to play in final qualifying competition): Kamal Chawla bt Varun Madan 4-1; Sourav Kothari bt Himanshu Jain 4-0; J Varun Kumar bt IH Manudev 4-1; Pushpender Singh bt Rafath Habib 4-2.

Round 4: Chawla bt IV Rajeev 4-0; Madan bt Prem Prakash 4-1; Kothari bt Dilip Kumar 4-1; Jain bt Dhvaj Haria 4-1; Varun Kumar bt Rahul Sachdev 4-0; Manudev bt Santosh R 4-2; Pushpender Singh bt Loganathan R 4-3; Habib bt Balachandra Bhaskar 4-3.