With Rs one lakh up for grabs for the winner, the competition is intense, and Khandelwal, loaded with big guns, seem a safe bet to go through to the final. They lead their semi-final opponents, Tolani by 14 IMPs, with one more session to go.

In fact, Khandelwal lost the first session 20-35 to Tolani, the Summer National champions, but their 42-21 win in the second and their carryover of eight put them in a commanding position.

The other semi-final is a neck-to-neck battle between Poddar from Mumbai and Indian Railways A from Calcutta, with the former leading by four IMPs after 24 boards in a low-scoring match. Poddar won the first session 18-15 and added one more IMP by winning the second 31-30.

The final will be played overfour sets of 14 boards each. The final of the pairs event will see 24 teams playing each other for the first prize of Rs 30,000.

Earlier, barring Poddar, the rest of the teams won their quarter-final encounters quite convincingly. Poddar, who beat Puria 58-18 in the first session of 14 boards by 58-18 IMPs, lost the next 14-39. They had also conceded a carryover of 8.67, but thanks to their huge first session margin of 40 IMPs, they scraped through 72-65.67.

In the other encounters, Khandelwal Tubes, outplayed Sunil Machhar 73-47 IMPs; Indian Railways A, with a carryover of 8.5 beat Lal 71.5-38 and Tolani defeated Ingersoll Rand 83-41. Ingersoll Rand had won the first session 35-34, but were routed in the second, losing 6-48.

Following are the quarter-final results: Khandelwal Tubes 73 (R Khandelwal, JM Shah, J Solani, K Misra, A Padhye, N Rajmohan) bt Sunil Machhar 47 (S Machhar, R Sreedharan, R Tolani, V Desai, AP Khare, A Shah); Indian Railways A 71.5 (S Bhattacharjee,, M Mukherjee, S Roy, SBhattacharjee, A Banerjee) bt Lal 38 (VM Lal, RL Kejriwal, P Kejriwal, B Sicka, A Rele, R Bhiwandkar); Poddar 72 (D Poddar, S Vaidya, S Agarwal, V Agarwal, J Mehta, B Ukidve) bt Puria 65.67 (BN Parasrampuria, A Tikare, P Doshi, S Deshpande, A Arundekar); Tolani 82 (RA Agrawal, G Biswas, B Pradhan, AM Bapat, A Vaidya).