MUMBAI, MARCH 12: Sunil Machhar (Mumbai) and Well Knit (Madras) had opened up sizeable leads over their rivals C V Rao and Indian Railways, respectively, after five sessions were gone through in the semi-finals of the bridge selection trials to pick the Indian team for the Bridge Federation of Asia and Middle East Championships.At the Central Railway Auditorium on Friday, Sunil Machhar led C V Rao 178-132 for an advantage of 46 VPs, including a carryover of 19 VPs, and Well Knit were ahead of Railways by 29.5 VPs at 204-174.5, negating Railways' carry over of 2.5 VPs.With 16 more boards to be played, the two leaders seem favourites to advance to the final of these trials, conducted by the Mumbai Sports and Bridge Association, which will be played over 128 boards.The other semi-finals is a repeat of the Nationals finals for the Ruia Cup and it seems as if it may turn out to be sweet revenge for Sunil Machhar, who had ended up losing to CV Rao on that occasion.Semi-final placings after fiverounds: Sunil Machhar 178 (Sunil Machhar, R Sreedharan, A Khare, R Tolani, V Desai, S Vaidya) vs CV Rao 132 (CV Rao, V Krishnamurthy, SK Iyengar, D Roy, Ashim Mukherjee, P Kushari); Well Knit 204 (CR Badrinath, AS Vishwanathan, R Krishnan, B Prabhakar, S Sunderam, P Sridhar) vs Railways 174.5 (SK Bhattacharya, AK Das, S Roy, M Mukherjee, R Roy).Selection trials: Selection trials to pick the second teams to represent Maharashtra for the summer Nationals will be held at the Central Railway Auditorium on March 20 from 10 a.m. All winners of state ranking tournaments will be eligible to take part in this selection trials and the entry fee is Rs 1,500 per team and Rs 6,000 per sponsored team.
