Making career's first entry into medal round of world billiards championship, B. Bhaskar of India will surely be delighted with his performance in this year's championship. Today he knocked out the defending champion Peter Gilchrist to place himself in the semi finals. He beat Peter by 211 points (797-586).
India's ace cueist Pankaj Advani made an unprecedented break of 701 points to set new high break for this year's World Billiard (timed) championship. The previous best was 551 which Peter Gilchrist made on the first day of the championship.
Ashok Shandilya from India was under threat of losing Last-32 knockout match against Christopher Taylor of England.
Chris was in commanding form since start and maintained good lead in first hour of play when Shandilya got a breakthrough and made breaks of 109 and 81 points to recover the trailing points and impose 59 points win on Englishman Chris.
David Causier of England claimed the top-seed slot for timed format knockouts achieving highest average of 1120.25 at the end of round robin stage. He scored total 5173 points in favour and gave away only 692. The defending champion, Peter Gilchrist followed him with an average of 954.50.
The second session of today had a house pack audience on centre table of Northern Snooker Centre to witness an exciting match between Pankaj Advani and Rob Hall. The spectators had no disappointment as both the players exhibited their best and entertained everyone with a very high quality contest. However, one had to win and Advani did but both the cueists deserved to be acknowledged as winners in the virtual land.
In the last session of the day, efforts put in by Sourav Kothari with a break of 200 points went in vain when former World Champion Ashok Shandilya hammered with small but serial breaks of 80, 56, 98, 63, 98 and 75 to edge pass Kothari and beat him by 104 points. Till 100 minutes the match score was very close and it could be anyone's game but in the last moments of play a break of 75 points by Shandilya put him ahead of Kothari.
The defending champion, Peter Gilchrist of Singapore exhibited clinical game of billiards today morning and started his campaign in timed format of World Billiards 2014. He was playing against Wayne Doyle of Ireland where first he made a break of 103 and then the massive one 551 to reach total score of 976 in two hours game of round robin. In response to that Doyle managed 243 before losing to Gilchrist.
Pankaj Advani leaving no stone unturned against the stiff challenge he is receiving from Peter Gilchrist. The final of 2014 World Billiards (150Up) Championship had begun at 1300 hours UK Time and now at interval after 2 hours 30 minutes, Advani is leading 3-2.
The versatile and 10 time world champion Pankaj Advani is just a match away from another world title in cue-sports. The pro-turned Advani gave away his two years old professional snooker career for his true love of billiards and he has proving himself right that he always do in the game of three balls 'billiards' more passionately.
