Manish Jain of Bengal and Mumbai troika Hasan Badami, Siddharth Parikh and Himanshu Jain today booked their berth in the final qualifying tournament for next March's Indian Open Snooker tournament by reaching the semi finals of the first stage qualifiers here today.
Badami defeated city rival Rahul Sachdev 4-2 even as Himanshu dropped one frame while getting past Pune rival Yogesh Sharma in the quarter finals at the Cricket Club of India.
The other two, Parikh and Manish, sailed through without dropping a frame in their quarter final matches.
These four would be joined by 12 other first stage qualifiers from events held in Delhi (Varun Madan, Alok Kumar, Sumit Talwar, Anuj Uppal), Chennai (J Varun Kumar, R Girish, Vijay Nichani, Neeraj Kumar) and Indore (Manan Chandra, Rajat Khaneja, Rafat Habib, Pushpender Singh), along with the top 8 players of the country, in the final qualifiers to be held in Pune's P Y C Hindu Gymkhana from September 15-18.
The top 8 players - Pankaj Advani, Kamal Chawla, Brijesh Damani, Dharminder Lily, Faizal Khan, Sundeep Gulati, laxman Rawat and Shivam Arora - and the other 16 qualifiers would fight to gain six wild cards for the Indian Open in Mumbai which has been put off from October 13-17 to March 10-14, 2015 following the announcement yesterday of the Maharashtra assembly polls on October 15.
The six wild card recipients would get the opportunity to rub shoulders with the best in the world of snooker during the world ranking Indian Open event in which the top 64 players of the WPBSA are expected to take part and vie for the total prize fund of pound sterling 300,000.
Today's quarter final results: Hasan Badami beat Rahul Sachdev 4-2 (63-45, 74 (break-74 unfinished)-04, 62-64 (51), 08-54 (53), 55-19, 64-21); Siddharth Parikh beat Vipin Premi (UP) 4-0 (63-28, 63-07, 67-42, 68-24); Manish Jain (Bengal) beat Akshay Kumar (UP)4-0 (70-48, 77-61, 68-21, 84-42); Himanshu Jain beat Yogesh Sharma (Pune) 4-1 (55-57, 68-27, 61-32, 58-14, 64-27).
