Shree Cement upset Formidables to win Tolani Grand Prix bridge meet

Mumbai, Oct 31 (UNI) Shree Cement team (Kolkata) (Manas Mukherjee, Rana Roy, Subrata Saha, Bivas Todi and Subir Majumder) beat fancied Formidables from Delhi (Kiran Nadar, B Satyanarayana, Rajesh Dalal, Subhash Gupta, KR Venkatraman and Sunit Chokshi) by 31 IMPs (155-124) to win the team of four duplicate bridge event in the Rs 5 lakh Tolani Grand Prix here last night.

The winners, who had won the HCI title earlier, won Rs 1.5 lakh and the runners-up got Rs 1 lakh.

Kiran Nadar's side had the better of the exchanges in the first and second segments in the 64-board final. But in the final segment, when the difference was just 14 IMPs (113-99), Shree Cement benefited by 14 IMPs from a slam bid that went down and a 42-26 score to prevail.

The win also gave them a berth in the BFI selection trials to pick the Indian team for the Beijing Bridge Olympiad 2008.

R Venkatesh/R Krishnan won the pairs event with a total of 555.13 points beating to second place Bengal's AN Banerjee/Sumit Mukherjee (539.80) with another Bengal pair SN Dey Sarkar/P Bardhan (533.76) third.

UNI