The first leg of the National Bridge Championship was concluded last evening at Lahore Gymkhana Club Card Room, when two teams, Preemptors and J.K. IV emerged as the top ones and thereby qualified to play the final round of the Bareeze Pakistan National Bridge Championship and the national trials to be held, later this month, at the Lahore Gymkhana Club from March 23 to 27. Besides these two qualifiers, four teams from Sindh and two from Rawalpindi and Islamabad will land at the prestigious bridge tables of Gymkhana to compete and the best team out of these eight will achieve the distinction of being the National Champions and earn the right to represent the country in the 2nd Mind Sports Championship to be held at Lille, France this coming August.
As regards the qualifying contest in Lahore, Pre-emptors comprising of Izzat Khalil, Air Cdre. Safdar Mahmood, Assad Iqbal, Jahangir Ahmed Malik Ghias and Ahsan Qureshi excelled in the double round robin matches and finished on top with 62 Victory Points(VP). In the contests they virtually crushed Silver Star team with a big Margin 25-2, but lost to J.K IV 12-18, a not too heartening feature for them. J.K IV a star-studded team failed to be the stars of the qualifying round and although technically they won all their matches but on a VP scale played a draw against Silver Star and Tigers 15-15 and beat the winners 18-12. The Team consisted of Javed Khalid, Shauq Hussain, Saeed Akhtar and Masood Mazhar all players of international fame. In the aggregate, J.K IV accumulated 48 victory points. Tigers consisting of Moin Rauf, Rana Kamal, Suleman Bokhari, Sajjid Bokhari Hamza and Salman were third with 38 VP’s. Silver Star consisting of Taqi Imam, Tanvir Ahmed, Sikander Butt, Imran K and Mian Tariq ended up third with 38 VP’s. Sarfraz Butt supervised these trials at the Gymkhana Club.
