India's biggest event in bridge begins Sunday

Chennai, Dec 3 (IBNS) The 53rd Winter National Bridge Championships, the biggest and most prestigious tournaments in the Indian Bridge calendar, begins here Sunday with an exciting mix of events to provide opportunities to players at all levels.

While the experts, life masters, veterans and the like will be matching their wits to get their hands on the Ruia Gold Trophy, the less experienced will vie for the Ruia Silver Trophy; both events taking place simultaneously, starting Sunday after the inauguration by Mr. Vijayakumar, I.A.S, Member Secretary, Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu.

This week long premier event, held during winter, in a different city each year, has come to Chennai, this year.

This is the 5th occasion this National Championships is being organised by Tamilnadu Bridge Association.

In addition to the above two events, there are many events for teams, for pairs, for individuals, for players at different proficiency levels during the seven day long programme.

More than a 1000 players are expected to congregate at the JN Indoor Stadium from Dec 04.

Since all the best players in the country will be seen in action, the quality, the standard that will be on view will be of the highest order, it is expected.

Former India international Ms. Kiran Nadar, Subhas Gupta, K Venkatraman, B Prabhaakar, R Tewari and B Satyanarayan who won the Rui Gold Cup for Formidables last year in Kolkata will be seen in action this time as well.

Ruia Gold Cup runners up Poddar Developers from Mumbai would also be there with Dipak Poddar, Jitu Solani, R A Agarwal and M A Thavre.

They would be strongly challenged by Railways.

With Sumit Mukherjee, Manas Mukherjee, Debabrata Mazumdar, all of whom have represented the country in the Bridge world cup and veteran Amarnath Mukherjee in
their fold Railways have been rated as one of the very strong contender for the title.

Led by captain of Indian team in the last Bridge world cup at Eindhoven, Holland, Ashok Goel and another international Bhabesh Saha in the team Dhampur Sugar from Delhi will also stake their claim for the top honours this time.

Texan Aces, represented by among others Kaiser Ankelsaria and S Sundaram, would also pur a strong challenge in this meet.

One should not be surprised if Hemant Jalan's team from Kolkata, rated as "dark horse'' in this tournament and consisting of Kamal Mukherjee, Debashish Roy, Ashish Malhotra, Ajay Bagaria and 74 -year old Gobinda Sinha , causes a surprise this time.

(Reporting by Manik Banerjee)