Kolkata: Defending Champion Sourav Kothari was eliminated in the pre-quarters while Pankaj Advani, Siddharth Parikh, B Bhaskar and Dhruv Sitwala moved into the semi-finals of the BRC Gloster National Billiards Championship here Thursday.
In the quarter-finals at the Bengal Rowing Club, Advani (PSPB) beat Brijesh Damani (PSPB) 4-1 in a high-quality encounter. Advani was gracious in victory, terming Damani "tactically very sound and very dangerous in the shorter format".
Advani won the first frame convincingly. In the second frame, he made a break of 142 but missed a sitter cannon. Damani capitalized and snatched the frame to level the score 1-1.
In the vital third frame, Advani made sure that he did not give any chance to Damani and sealed the frame with an unfinished break of 146. There was no looking back for the 12-time World Champion after that and he scored century breaks in both the remaining frames to claim his place in the semis.
In another quarter-final, B. Bhaskar of Karnataka proved his class with fluent wins in four straight frames over Jaiveer Dhingra of Maharashtra, while scoring three century breaks.
Earlier, in the pre-quarter finals, Dhvaj Haria (PSPB) caused a huge upset beating Sourav Kothari (PSPB) 3-1, while in the other notable upsets, Siddharth Parikh (RSPB) beat Alok Kumar (PSPB) 3-2 and Dhingra beat Ashok Shandilya (RSPB) 3-1.
In the match against Kothari, Haria had two breaks of 137 and 110 in first and third games and though Kothari could have done better in the fourth game to set up the decider, he fell short by 9 points and lost the battle to the former Junior champion.
Last year's runner-up, Alok Kumar also lost the battle of the last 16 against Parikh. Both the cueists won alternate frames but Parikh controlled the decider and made an unfinished break of 150 points to move in quarter-finals.
Maharashtra boy Dhingra overcame Shandilya 3-1.
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