Manan, Shivam, Gulati, Chawla, Faisal and Lilly secured wildcards for Indian Open

Manan Chandra, Shivam Arora, Sundeep Gulati, Kamal Chawla, Faisal Khan and Dharminder Lilly secured the six wildcards on offer for the inaugural Indian Open 2013, a professional ranking snooker tournament. The prestigious tournament will be held in India for the first time from October 14 to 18 at Hotel Le Meridian in New Delhi. The event will offer prize money of £300,000, with the winner to take home £50,000.

While the top 64 players including Pankaj Advani and Aditya Mehta have qualified for the tournament, the battle to secure wildcards too witnessed a tough battle.

Delhi Billiards & Snooker Association, New Delhi and The Karnataka State Billiards Association, Bengaluru played hosts to the qualification process. A total of 84 cueists competed in the Delhi leg while a staggering 115 players registered for Bangalore.

In the final qualification last eight stage, Chandra, Arora, Gulati and Chawla sailed through after registering an identical 4-2 victories. The final two slots were decided in a nail-biting playoff where Faisal Khan beat Himanshu Jain in a thrilling fashion (4-3). After taking a 3-1 lead, young Jain made a remarkable recovery to level scores at 3-3. A close contest followed in the deciding frame too with Khan emergin as the winner. Meanwhile, Alok was leading 2-1 when Lilly, who returned to the sport after a break, did not allow Alok to move further and won back to back 3 frames and secured wildcard entry for him.

New Delhi :: 04 September 2013