Going back to the drawing board

The round-of-32 matches of the Senior National men’s billiards championship had to be replayed here on Friday due to a reseeding error.

While some last-32 outings had to be stopped mid-way, the results of the matches that were completed were declared null and void. Only Pankaj Advani’s victory over D. Bhuvaneswaran — the first and last seed respectively — remained unaffected by the reshuffle.

Veteran cueist Devendra Joshi explained, “There are two ways to look at this. On the one hand, the draw should be correct, even if it means that the players who had won have to replay their matches. On the other hand, it can be argued that once the draw was made and accepted by the players, it should not be changed, regardless of errors that were made. Overall, I think the correct decision was made.”

The 51-year-old Joshi said that he had never encountered an incident like this in his career.

Chief referee Kishore Khurana stated, “We made a human error in calculating the frame average, which resulted in the wrong seeding. This affected the entire last-32 draw. Rishab Thakkar and Siddharth Parikh pointed out the error. We stopped all the matches and checked the draw again. We realised that we had got it wrong. I’m happy that none of the players objected to our decision to replay the matches.”

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