The cream of Indian cueists, including India’s top-8 ranked snooker players, National champion Pankaj Advani (ONGC), runner-up Laxman Rawat (Indian Oil), losing semi-finalists Aditya Mehta (ONGC) and Kamal Chawla (Railways) will be vying for the top honours and the Champions’ top prize of Rs two lakhs in the Rs 12.9 lakhs prize-money CCI All India Open Snooker Championship 2019, organised by the Cricket Club of India at the club’s Sir Wilson Jones Billiards Room starting from Monday, March 4 to Tuesday, March 19, 2019.
Sourav Kothari (ONGC), who had finished runner-up in the last edition, Sundeep Gulati (Delhi), Varun Madan (Delhi) and M. Yogesh Kumar (Karnataka) are the four other top ranked Indians in the fray.
The runner-up will pocket a purse of Rs 1.30 lakhs, while the two losing semi-finalists will receive an award of Rs 75,000 each. The losing quarter-finalists will get Rs 40,000 each while cueists who lose in the round of 16 round, round of 32 and round of 64 would each earns sums of Rs 25,000, 12,500 and 7,000 respectively. In additional a special cash award of Rs 25,000 would be presented to the player who compiles the highest break, minimum qualification is a break above 130.
Last year’s champion Brajesh Damani (West Bengal), Sumit Talwar (Chandigarh), Divya Sharma (Haryana), Akshay Kumar (UP), Himanshu Jain (Telenga) and Shoaib Khan (Delhi) are some of the strong contenders from outside Mumbai.
The local challenge will come from CCI players Nikhil Ootam, Rahul Sachdev, Hasan Badani, Mukund Bharadia and Shabaaz Khan. Khar Gymkhana’s young talented cueists Sparsh Pherwani, Kreishh Gurbaxani and Ishpreet Singh Chadha will also look to make an impact.
Veteran cueists and former National champions, two-time Asian snooker champion Yasin Merchant (Khar Gymkhana) and Alok Kumar (ONGC) would also be fighting it out.
Three ladies – Sangeeta Hemchand (CCI), Aratxa Sanchis (Pune) and Varsha Sanjeev (KSBA) will also be seen in action.