Leading exponents of the three-ball green baize game, billiards, will be seen competing for the top honours in Chembur Gymkhana Handicap Billiards Tournament 2018. The main draw will commence at the Chembur Gymkhana billiards hall from Saturday.
Leading the field in the 16-player ‘Elite’ group is Chembur Gymkhana stalwarts Ashok Shandilya a former World billiards champ and Vishal Madan, recent winner of the BSAM Maharashtra State selection billiards crown. The other big guns include, Aditya Agrawal (ECC), Arun Agrawal (Matunga Gym), Dhruv Sitwala, Devendra Joshi, Hitesh Kotwani (all Hindu Gym), Rishabh Thakkar (Otters Club), Nalin Patel and Rishab Kumar (both Bombay Gymkhana), Siddharth Parikh (Railways) and S. Srikrishna (Chennai).
The 16 players seeded directly in the main draw will be joined by 16 qualifiers and the 32 players will be divided into eight groups of 4-each. The initial rounds will a round-robin league.
The tournament offers a cash award of Rs 40,000 to the champion and Rs 25,000 to the runner-up. The losing semi-finalists would receive a prize of Rs 15,000 each and the four losing quarter-finalists would get Rs 8,000 each. The players who get knocked out in the pre-quarter-final will receive a sum of Rs 5,000 each and the 16 qualifiers would earn Rs 2,000 each.
In addition an amount of Rs 10,000 would be presented to player who records the highest break, the minimum qualification is a break of 250 or over.