National 9Ball champion Himanshu Jain
of Hyderabad, escaped to a thrilling 9-8 victory to give the main draw
an explosive start in the Otters Club All India 9Ball Pool Tournament
that started today.
Jain, who was trailing 1-5 and then 3-6 in the race to nine rack
contest, rallied with a spectacular late burst to beat Nitesh Madan
of Railways for his second win in Group B, after prevailing over another
qualifier Rahul Sachdev of Maharashtra a session before.
"I never
expected to win after falling behind by a huge margin"
said Jain. "After
playing so well in the first half, Nitesh suddenly started committing
errors. I chose to take each rack at a time and produced positive
results."
In
other close ties that went down to the wire, Divya Sharma of
Haryana who defeated Yasin Merchant 9-8. Yasin was down 4-8 when
he recovered and set decider but couldn’t save the last rack and lost.
Even further, nothing went right for Yasin as he lost another match
where 2013 Asian Under-21 Snooker Bronze medallist, Sahil Nayyar
of Punjab, trounced him 9-5.
Sahil
controlled the match well and obtained 4-2 lead. Yasin tried to emerge
strong in 7th Rack but a ‘decision in question’ went in favour of Sahil
and he further succeed to raise his lead.
Later Yasin again tried to recover and pocketed three more frames but
Sahil closed the proceedings by winning the 14th rack to score 9-5.
Now Yasin has very meagre chance to reach knockouts but it all depends
on remaining matches that are schedule on Thursday.
Meanwhile,
Dharminder Lilly,
Alok Kumar,
Monu Chaudhary
and
Aayush Kumar
have already confirmed their berth for the knockout stage Last-16.
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