Seven time world champion Geet Sethi performed under pressure to recover from the jaws of elimination and storm into the senior billiards pre-quarter-finals in the LIC-BSNL National Billiards and Snooker Championship in Chennai on Wednesday night.
Among others, World IBSF billiards champion Pankaj Advani topped the league players with a plus of 3,576 points followed by Sourav Kothari (PSPB) with 1,495 points to emerge as the top two seeds in the knock-out stage of the championship.
Advani's run so far has been phenomenal as he tallied 4,519 points from five matches and his rivals could muster 938 points against him.
Taking to the table with a deficit of 227 points to Yasin Merchant of Maharashtra to make the grade, Sethi finished runner-up to Kothari, the leader of the group C.
Sethi, who lost two of his four earlier round-robin league matches, was on song, giving some lessons to Merchant on top table play.
Merchant, on his part, could not find his rhythm as Sethi came up with his tactical and sound technical play. It was a revelation to watch the manner in which Sethi was rolling the cue and the red balls to the top table and making the yellow ball move from its position after accumulating over 40 points and then rotating them.
Earlier, defending national champion Advani and last year's runner-up Devendra Joshi, both representing Petroleum Sports Control Board, sailed into the senior billiards' pre-quarter-finals.
Among the 84-cueists, in the round-robin league of the (eight groups of six players each) championship, Advani has ruled the roost, coming up with two runs of over a thousand points and also the highest break -- 867 -- besides a 331 and four century breaks in four of five matches in Group-A.
Joshi (Group-B) has also maintained a clean slate, having won all his four matches to progress to the next stage like Sourav Kothari (PSPB-Group-C), Dharmender Lily (Pun-Group-D).
Other star players who made it into the last 16 include former Asian champion Ashok Shandilya (Rlys-Group-D), Karnataka's B Bhaskar (Group-E), former national champion Dhrun Sitwala (PSPB-Group-G), Alok Kumar (PSPB-Group-F) and Rupesh Shah (Guj-Group-H).
