45th UP State Bridge Championship at Meerut 2015

45th UP State Bridge Championship took place at Alexander Club, Meerut from July 31 - August 2, 2015. The event was organised along with 5th Alexander Club Bridge Championship for Northern India. 20 teams including 14 UP teams took part in the Championship. The event was very well organised by Meerut Bridge Association in association with Alexander Club. A lot of credit goes to Alexander club for promoting bridge in this part of UP. Justice BP Singh & Sri CP Agarwal and their team from Meerut Bridge Association put in lot of hard work to make the event a success. Executive Committee of Bridge Association (U.P.) was delighted to give its Organisational Colours to Sri CP Agarwal, Sri Pulak Garg, Sri Rakesh Goel and Sri Sanjay Jain of Meerut Bridge Association. There was good coverage of event in dailies of Meerut. The food was very nice and play progressed without any appeal in very congenial conditions. Sri NK Jain was CTD and was assisted by Sri Sanjay Jain, Sri Rakesh Goel and Sri Pradeep Singh. Sri TC Pant looked after technical work very efficiently.

From 2012 the UP State Championship was made open to neighbouring states inviting one team each. This year six teams from Delhi took part in the event.

Rajendra Kumar Gargya Trophy for Best UP Team in Duplicate Event

20 teams took part in the event and played 8 rounds of swiss league of 8 boards with 20-0 continuous scoring after which 4 teams qualified for SF. Satyam, Delhi topped the swiss league followed by Pradeep's 6, Varanasi. NCL A, Singrauli finished third and Kosmos, Delhi was last team to qualify. In 8*2 SF Pradeep's 6 defeated NCL A and Kosmos defeated Satyam. In 10*2 final Pradeep's 6 bettered Kosmos to win the trophy. Third place play off went to NCL A. The final results are:

1. Pradeep's 6, Varanasi (Pradeep Anand Singh, Kr Vijayanand Singh, AK Sinha, BN Rastogi, Pankaj Mehta, Indresh Agarwal)
2. Kosmos, Delhi (TC Pant, Daleep Mutreja, Rajesh Jain, Ravichandran, Anil Bharihoke)
3. NCL A, Singrauli (Dr Sumit De, Ashoke De, PK Chakraborty, Chinmoy Goswami, JN Chatterjee)
4. Satyam, Delhi (SK Agarwal, Ved Prakash, YP Punj, SR Malhotra, Col BS Yadav, Madhu Sudan Sharma)

Pradeep's 6 was also awarded Nimita Agarwal Trophy from Alexander Club for being overall winner.


Madhava Prasad Trophy for Duplicate Silver Event

There was a Silver event for non qualifiers of Duplicate event. 16 teams took part in the event. They played swiss league of 4 rounds of 8 boards each with discrete 20-0 scale scoring. The results are as follows:

1. RS Misra, Allahabad (RS Misra, BN Agarwal, AP Singh, SP Sharma, Jitendra Pandey)
2. Rajjan, Allahabad (Bal Agarwal, SP Srivastava, Shanker Chatterjee, Deepak Chatterjee, RK Shukla, Pintoo Bose)
3/4. JK5, Meerut (JK Agarwal, Pulak Garg, Dr Vakul Airan, Ravinder Singh, HK Girdhar)
3/4. Asha's 5, Delhi (Asha Sharma, Devi Bhatnagar, Subhash Gupta, Arvind Prasad, V Jhunjhunwala)


Dr JS Kothiwal Trophy for Best UP Pair in Pairs Event

43 pairs took part in the event. The event was played over two sessions on final day of 22 boards each with Scrambelled Mitchell movement.

The results are as follows:

1. Kr Vijayanand Singh & Pradeep Anand Singh (Varanasi)
2. Amarjit & Dr Nikita Kamal (Delhi)
3. Devi/Asha & Subhash Gupta (Delhi)
4. Shantanu Rastogi & TP Khare (Lucknow)
5. Vijay Goel & NK Gupta (Delhi)

Kr Vijayanand Singh & Pradeep Anand Singh were also awarded Surinder Singh Trophy from Alexander Club for being overall Pair winner.

Personally for me finishing second among UP Pairs and fourth overall was a satisfactory result. I was playing in the State Championship after 2 years. As the last two State Championship were held at Lucknow I was involved in organisational work with no time for playing. I read somewhere famous Larry Cohen account of how he dropped World Pair Championship on last two deals, I definitely dropped second position overall on last but one deal where a phone call in between the deal affected my concentration and I slipped in defence costing us crucial matchpoints. The last deal was good for us. So if I had not slipped in penultimate deal and the last deal had been as good (our opponents went overboard in the last deal) then we could have finished higher.


VK Chaube Trophy for Highest Masterpoint Grosser from UP in 2014

1. Pradeep Anand Singh
2. Kr Vijayanand Singh
3. TP Khare

UP players please note:

1. Pradeep's 6 would represent UP at Inter State Championship at Nagpur taking place from September 3-6, 2015.
2. Kr Vijayanand Singh & Pradeep Anand Singh would represent UP at Rama Jain 2016.
3. Pairs representing UP in Agarwala Trophy at Inter State Championship at Nagpur are:
i). Kr Vijayanand Singh & Pradeep Anand Singh
ii) Shantanu Rastogi & TP Khare
iii) Shanker Chatterjee & Deepak Chatterjee