44th UP State Bridge Championship at Lucknow 2014

44th UP State Bridge Championship took place at VKS Varadan Auditorium, Geological Survey of India from August 1-3, 2014. The event was organised in association with Geological Survey Receation Club (GSRC) which provided basic infrastructure for bridge. There is no better AC venue than this auditorium in Lucknow. Lucknow Bridge Association would like to thank Sri SK Sharma, DDG, GSI, who was also chief guest of opening function, for providing the venue free of cost and providing rooms at guest house. Sri JR Gupta from GSRC was ever willing to help out in organizational work and deserves credit. The entire Lucknow Bridge Association (LBA) team led by Sri NN Rastogi - President which included Sri BN Rastogi, Sri RK Singh, Sri M Srivastava Sri RA Siddiqui, Sri TP Khare, Sri Vipin Rai & Sri BD Sarkar to name a few deserve accolades for organising the event. This event was organized by LBA to mark its Golden Jubilee and three of the founder members namely Sri BB Lal, Sri NC Rai & Sri NN Rastogi were felicitated during closing function where Sri Mukul Goel, ADG (law & order) was chief guest. Kr Vijayanand Singh , President, Bridge Association (U.P.) also deserves the credit for alloting this championship to Lucknow. Sri NN Rastogi was CTD who was ably assisted by Sri SP Sharma & myself. Cash prizes of Rs 60000 were given. This is record 11th time that Lucknow is hosting State Chmpionship. For past two occasions (2009 & 2013) LBA had been frugal and there were no internal funds used to organize but this year being Golden Jubilee year LBA decided to give dinners, give gifts to participants & published a souvenir also. Except for Souvenir all this was done through internal funds.

From 2012 the UP State Championship was made open to neighbouring states inviting one team each. It was heartening that a team from Jabalpur, MP and a mixed team of Bihar, Jharkhand and UP took part this year.


Duplicate Event for Kr Krishnanand Prasad Singh Memorial Trophy

20 teams took part in the event. They played 8 rounds of modified swiss league of 8 boards each to determine 6 qualifiers for super league. The super league was of 5 rounds of 8 boards each. 20-0 continuous scale was used for scoring.KDI, Moradabad (Pankaj Mehta, Pradeep Singh, Kr Vijayanand Singh, IK Agarwal, BN Rastogi, AK Sinha) topped the swiss league with 104.13 VPs and were awarded Madhava Prasad Memorial Trophy for swiss league winners.Ganges, Kanpur (BN Batra, HS Dua,VM Gupta, Mukul Arren, IP Jain) with 102.79, Siddiqui, Lucknow (RA Siddiqui, B Prasad, NC Bhattacharya, GN Mehrotra, TP Khare, JS Kaul) with 99.76, Lucknow Bl ue (Mukul Gupta, SA Abbasi, SH Zaheer, SQ Wajahat, MA Quadri, CP Singh,) with 97.06, Tiwari's (VK Tiwari, Girish Kumar, SM Moin, Sunil Kumar, Arun Srivastava, Ajay Garg) with 94.13 and NCL, Singrauli (Dr Sumit De, C Goswami, Ashok Dey, PP Agarwalla) with 87.38 were other qualifiers. After Super league Siddiqui emerged winners of Kr Krishnanand Prasad Singh Memorial trophy with 61.19 VPs.So the Golden Jubilee celebrations became more sweeter as a home team won the championship. Ganges, Kanpur came second with 5334 VPs. KDI, Tiwari's, Lucknow Blue & NCL finished in that order. All the 6 teams were given prizes. Siddiqui's team would also represent UP in the Inter State Championship at Patna.

Matchpoint Pairs for Dr JS Kothiwal Memorial Trophy

48 pairs took part in the event. The event was played over four sessions with no final. The first two sesions were played on day 2. The super league teams joined on session 3 & 4 on day 3 with 12th position scores. All the sessions were of 18 boards each.

The results are as follows:

1. Girish Kumar & SM Moin (Patna) - 670.76
2. Deepak Kothiwal & Ajay Vaish (Moradabad) - 666.83
3. AK Vashishtha & Mrs Shobha Vashishtha (Lucknow) - 664.67
4. HK Singh & Manish Jaiswal (Lucknow) - 655.5
5. VK Tiwari & Sunil Kumar (Lucknow/Ranchi) - 645.76
6. Shankar Chatterjee & Deepak Chatterjee (Allahabad) - 645.19

As the top finisher pair was not from UP, the Kothiwal trophy went to second placed pair of Deepak Kothiwal & Ajay Vaish.They also get a chance to represent UP in Rama Jain pairs event in Delhi. The top 3 UP pairs would also represent UP in the Agarwalla trophy in Inter State Championship at Patna. It is heartening to note that Mrs Shobha Vashishtha is the first woman from UP to get the honour of representing state in the Inter State Championship since its inception.

Bridge Association (UP) has been felicitating UP players who have grossed highest masterpoints in a calender year with the criterion that the players should be interested in playing for UP and have UP registration number and should normally be residing in the state. VK Chaube , who was an eminent bridge administrator of Lucknow and a retired GM of Railways who passed away recently, family has come forward and has decided to donate a trophy in his memory to be given to the highest masterpoint winner in a calendar year from UP. The trophy for 2013 went to Pradeep Singh. Kr Vijayanand Singh finished runners up. They got prizes of Rs 5000 & Rs 3000 respectively. Pradeep has won this trophy for third year in a row.The third highest grosser BN Rastogi got Rs 2000. This felicitation also took place during prize distribution and winner got the trophy from Smt Chaube.