India enter finals of all three categories in Bridge C'ship

Indian card players rose in unison to enter the finals of all three categories of the 17th Bridge Federation of Asia & Middle East championship on the penultimate day of the meet, here today.
All the Indian teams by virtue of reaching the finals have qualified to play for World Championship to be held in Bali, Indonesia later this year.
In the summit clash, the seniors will take on their counterparts from Bangladesh while the women's team will face traditional rivals Pakistan. The title clash in the Open category will see the hosts locking horns with Bahrain.
The Indian seniors - Ashok Kumar Goel, Vinod Sharma, Kamal Krishna Mukherjee, Alok Sadhu, R Sridharan and Sunil Machhar- put up a commendable show to finish at the top with 224 VPs.

After defeating Sri Lanka by 21-9, they outplayed Bangladesh by 24-6 VPs.
The women's team, consisted of Hema Deora, Bharati Dey, Rita Choksi, Marrianne Karmarkar, Asha Surana and Tutu Narula kept their cool and played well to win both their round robin matches and qualify for the title clash ending second to Pakistan with 205.5 VPs.

In the first session of the Open category, the semifinal between India and UAE, the former represented by Kiran Nadar, Sunit Choksi, Satyanarayana Bachiraju, K R Venkatraman, Balakrishnan Prabhakar and Rajeshwar Tewari started well to total 45 international Match Points (IMPs) at the end of the first session against 22 by their rivals.

The second session saw the hosts dominating the dhow further and buttressed their lead having a total of 111 IMPs against 33 by the Emirates. Stung by the reverse, UAE shook off their lethargy and bagged 50 IMPs against 25 by India to narrow down their margin to 83-116 which, however, was not enough as the home side totaled 177 against 100 IMPs by UAE.
The points in the knock-out stage are counted as International Match Points unlike Victory points in the league stage.