LAHORE, March 21: The Indian pair of K.R. Venkatraman-Subhash Gupta with 1105.20 Match Points won the 8th Balijee memorial bridge championship Pairs Event at the Lahore Gymkhana on Monday.

The winning pair were hot favourites among a field of 76 pairs.

Their winning stride was so consistent and steady that Pakistan Pair of Pervaiz Mirza-Gulzar Bilal remained runners-up after scoring 997 MPs.

The last session which started in the morning, was the most exciting of all three. Many dramatic fluctuations came about as a lot of pairs tried making belated efforts to overcome their earlier deficits.

But Venkatraman-Subhash displayed consistency in their performance.

At one stage, the duo had taken an unassailable lead 766.20 to 674.43 to the Pakistani pair. At this stage, Pervaiz and Gulzar, defending champions, had given up the fight to catch Venkatraman-Subhash and focussed more on to thwart the challenge of their team-mate Sultan Siddiqui-Rashid Jafar who came third with 984.43MPs.

The pair of Abeda Ali-Shahnaz Pirzada won first place in the Open Ladies contest, followed by the Indian pair of Beneeta Chandra-Urmila Aggarwal and Rehana Saigol-Zeenat Azwar (Pak) who earned second and third spots, respectively.

There are 33 teams competing for the team event.

Prominent are Punters, Candyland, Giant, Data Steel, Solox, Challengers Jarrar Taees from Pakistan and formidable, Delhi Bridge Association “A” and DBA-2 and two teams from Delhi Gymkhana.

Results:

K. R Venkatraman-Subhash Gupta (1105.20), Pervaiz Mirza-Gulzar Bilal (997), Sultan Siddiqui-Rashid Jafar (984.43), Tahir Masud-Munir Ataullah (978), Suri-Shyam Sharma (974) Fehmina Hussain-Tahir Abbas (964), Zia-Ahsan (936), Khalid Mohiuddin-Mohsin Chandna (933), Hans Varma-R.K Gupta (918), Anand Virmani-Ravi Batra (913).