The Hindu : Sport / Bridge : Indian women do well

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Oct 02, 2007
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Sport - Bridge

Indian women do well

R. Jayaram

Chennai: The Indian women’s team led by Hema Deora (Rita Choksi, Lina Mayadas, Marianne Karmarkar, Sheelu Thadani and Usha Kabra are the other members) is in the seventh position — eight qualify for the quarterfinals — at the end of six rounds of league matches in the Venice Cup of the World bridge championship being played in Shanghai.

On Monday, it began convincingly by beating Egypt (21-9), lost to current title holder France (9-21), but ended a fine day’s performance by beating front-runner New Zealand, 19-11.

USA-1 (124), USA-2 (118) and New Zealand (115) occupy the top three positions now, in this event.

Miserable run

Ashok Goel’s Indian Open team continued its miserable run in the Bermuda Bowl, collecting a measly 23 Victory Points for the day, and is languishing at the bottom of the table of 22 countries.

India has won the BFAME championship four times and has been a quarterfinalist twice in the Bermuda Bowl in the recent past, but the current Indian team lost all its three matches on Monday, including the one against Pakistan (7-23).

With just 57 VPs from six matches, it does not have even a faint chance of qualifying for the quarterfinals.

The Indian seniors, though, did create a major upset in the Seniors Bowl when it beat USA-2 (22-8) in the fifth round.

The disappointment of the tournament so far has been the performance of the USA-2 team in the Bermuda Bowl.

The first five of the six players in this team (Dick Freeman, Bob Hamman, Jeff Meckstroth, Eric Rodwell, Nick Nickell and Hemant Lall) have been world champions several times over and in Shanghai, they have a tally of 89 VPs after six rounds and it would require a miraculous performance from them in the next 15 rounds to be in the last eight.

The top eight at the end of round six: Bermuda Bowl: USA-1 (133), Poland (112), Norway (110), Italy (108), China SMEG (101), Argentina (101), Australia (99), and Brazil (95).

Venice Cup: USA-1 (124), USA-2 (118), New Zealand (115), England (114), Denmark (108), Germany (102), India (98), France and the Netherlands (94 each).

Seniors Bowl: USA-1 (124), Italy (115), Egypt (113), Australia (112), USA-2 (112), Canada (111), Poland (107), and Indonesia (103).

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