National 8Ball & 9Ball Pool Championship 2008

Kolkata - West Bengal

16-26 May 2008

Rafath Habib sizzles !!!

With the women’s events having been concluded, the boys got down to serious business in the ongoing ONGC-Spring Club National 8Ball Pool Championship being played at the Spring Club, Kolkata, on Monday. The double elimination format being followed for the first time didn’t throw up any surprises while the wheat was being separated from the chaff. The losing favourites again bounced back into reckoning when the knockout fixture was drawn with fresh seedings according to performances in this championship so far.

However, the re-seeding caused a raw deal for defending champion Devendra Joshi of PSPB. He lost closely to his stable-mate Manan Chandra, a former 8Ball Champion who racked out in a tense finish to win 7-5. But the unpredictability of pool games was brought home even more cruelly to the top seed of the re-drawn fixture, Sandeep Gulati who went down rather tamely to Amit Khansaheb, a finicky but flashy player from Maharashtra.

In a creditable show, young and promising Rishit Jain of Delhi made his presence felt in the Nationals by confidently eliminating veteran D.Raj Kumar of Karnataka 7-3. In the finest performance of the day, India # 3 of the Railways racked out as many as five times in his chanceless 7-1 routing of his dazed stable-mate Faisal Khan, who hardly missed anything because he was not given a chance to miss anything!