In its endeavour to promote sports, Royal Palm Golf and Country Club achieved another milestone as two bridge players, Asfandyar and Tahir Abbas contesting from the Bridge Playing arena of Royal Palm in The World Wide Bridge Contest.
The played superbly enough and because of their flawless performance emerged as the top pair in the World, bringing glory to self and Pakistan. This bridge contest was held simultaneously on June 1 and 2 at 336 bridge playing centers around the world with participation of 4673 pairs from 40 countries. According to the playing format of the World Wide Bridge Contest, the beauty of this form of play is that each pair competes against its opponents from all world centres and evaluation is made possible through the ECats System with results available as soon as the competition concludes and these results indicate a participating pairs standing at the Club level, the National level, Zonal level and World level.
And at the conclusion of the two days bridge pairs contest, it was the Royal Palms combination of seasoned and skillful Tahir Abbas and Mirza Asfandyar, a 19 year old, who secured the top position at the world level out of 4673 pairs, with a percentage of 71. 32. Along the way they also topped at the Club level, the National level, and the Zonal Level which includes Jordan and India.
Asfandyar stated, “I am delighted, I started playing bridge at the age of 13 and though I have acquired successes, this is a great moment in my bridge playing career. I was in Pakistan on a vacation from my University studies in John Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA and the big break has come”. He attributed the success to hard work, devoted coaching by his father, Mirza Shauq and mother, Fehmina who are national level bridge players. As for Tahir Abbas, he has been playing bridge for over 25 years and attributed the victory to the brilliance of Asfandyar. This youngster is unrattled by the big occasion and nothing can distract him when he is playing bridge. At the world level the winners were Asfandyar and Tahir Abbas(Pakistan), and runners up was the pair of De Masi Maurizi and Ponzio Elisabet(Italy) followed by Kamal Agarwal and G. N. Mehrotra(India), Mironov Sergey and Yakobson Lila(Russia), Nikos Voukoutis and Kostas Panoulos(Greece) and Bella Ionis and Roger Maurer(USA). At the Royal Palm Club Level the top performers were Asfandyar and Tahir followed by the pair of Ghias and Arshed and pair of Shoaib and Qadir.
At the National level the top performers were Asfandyar and Tahir Abbas(Royal Palm), Ghias and Arshed(Royal Palm), Qadir and Shoaib(Royal Palm), Safdar and Shamim(Royal Palm), Hassan Askari and M. Ghufram Asharaf(Karachi Bridge) and Tanveer and Taqi(Royal Palm). In the Zonal competitions the world is divided into 8 zones and Pakistan was placed in Zone 4 alongwith Jordan and India. At this level too Asfanyar and Tahir Abbas were first followed by Kamal Agarwal and G. N. Mehrotra(India), Rana Roy and D. C Bagchi(India), Ghias and Arshed(Royal Palm, Pakistan), Z. Kayli and Omer(Jordan), and Qadir and Shoaib(Royal Palm, Pakistan).
