Indians win at last

HAMMAMET, October 23: There was victory at last for the Indian men's team at the Bermuda Bowl World Bridge Championships, while the women d...

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HAMMAMET, October 23: There was victory at last for the Indian men’s team at the Bermuda Bowl World Bridge Championships, while the women despite lying in the lower half of the standings scored another fine result, this time beating China one of the better rated teams in the Venice Cup.

The men, who had failed to win a single match in the first six rounds, first crashed to a 8-22 defeat at the hands of China before eking out a 17-13 win over Brazil and another by 19-11 over the hosts and last ranked Tunisia.

The women, who scored a slender 16-14 win over Germany yesterday — it was wrongly reported yesterday that they had lost 14-16 to them — had a bad start losing to lowly ranked Colombia, before stunning China 16-14. In the last match, the ninth round of the tournament, the Indian women crashed to a 10-20 defeat to Great Britain.

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The defeat at the hands of Colombia is something the Indian women could rue for they are among the poorly rated teams here and are lying one placed below India. The next three days will see the remaining eight rounds and both the men and women cannot afford to drop any valuable VPs against them if they entertain any hopes of getting into the top eight for the quarter-finals.

Meanwhile, both the American teams, I and II, were in dominant form. The men are first and second with 172 and 171 VPs, while the women teams are placed second and third behind France, whose lead of 19 VPs has now been whittled down to just five.