Ten team to vie for top honours in Bengal snooker league

Ten teams will vie for top honours when the second edition of the Bengal Premier Snooker League gets underway from June 20 at the Saturday Club here.

The six-day meet will be played in a league cum knockout format with the top four teams from the league table locking horns in the playoffs where there will be a two qualifiers and an eliminator like the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament.

Snooking Shooters are the defending champions. There were nine teams in the first edition. Three new teams, RKG Snooker Champs, Green Warriors and Alpha Cueists, have been inducted this time.

The total prize money is Rs 9 lakh 50 thousand with the winners purse kept at Rs 5 lakh. Runners up will be richer by Rs 3 lakh while the players of the winning team will each bag Rs 1 lakh. Players of the runners up side will get Rs 50,000.

Among the top players taking part are former Asian Billiards champion Sourav Kothari, 2010 Asian Games silver medal winner Brijesh Damani, Shahbaaz Khan and Manish Pandey.

There will be 40 local and 20 outstation players of the ilk of former Asian snooker and billiards champion Alok Kumar, 2006 IBSF World Championships semi-finalist Manan Chandra, 2016 IBSF World Snooker champion Dharminder Lilly, Kamal Chawla and Siddharth Parikh.

Each team will have six players with two marquee players in each side. In the inaugural year, it was one.

Delhi-based RKG Snooker Champs, for whom Kothari will be playing, is the only outstation team taking part. Damani will play for Cue Magicians.

The teams:

RKG Snooker Champs, The Rockets, Cue Magicians, Black Panthers, Green Warriors, Shooting Stars, Snooking Shooters, Pappu Penguins, City Knights, Alpha Cueists

--IANS

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