Aug. 11: A sextet with two Calcuttans will represent India at the 43rd World Bridge Championships in Lyon, France, tomorrow.
The star pair of Sumit Mukherjee and Debabrata Majumder, friends and employees of Indian Railways, will team up with captain Ashok Goel from Delhi and K.R. Venkatraman, S. Sundaram and P. Shridhar from Chennai.
The biennial championship with 22 teams will be on till August 26.
Mukherjee and Majumder have been part of Indian teams that have done well in international tournaments like reaching the pre-quarters in the Spring North American Bridge Championships in Kansas City in March.
In April, the group won the Bridge Federation of Asia and Middle East tournament in Dubai to qualify for the world championships. Bangladesh was the the runners up.
On Tuesday, a day before flying out, the two were busy with office work at the Metro Bhavan in the city.
But every free moment was spent playing bridge on their computers.
Speaking to Metro, Mukherjee sounded pragmatic. "Anything above the quarter-final would be good. Our opponents from the US, Italy, Sweden and France have better rankings."
Majumder said they had hardly had any time at home for the past two months. "Most of the times we were playing abroad. The last tournaments were in Toronto (July 19 to August 2) and Tokyo (July 1 to July 8)," he said.
International tournaments were the best practice ground, Mukherjee, an alumnus of Rajabazar science college, said.
Mukherjee spends an hour doing yoga every morning for better concentration. "It helps maintain focus at crunch moments. The games often stretch seven to eight hours and it gets tedious," he said.
Duplicate bridge, the most common variation of the game in competition, involves different partnerships in which the same hands are played successively.
There is an opaque screen across the table to ensure that players can see an opponent but not their partners, eliminating the chances of communication through gestures.
The teams will have six players split into three pairs, with two pairs playing and one on reserve, Mukherjee said.
An Indian team dominated by the two and captained by a Ballygunge resident finished fourth among 28 top international teams at the World Invitation Bridge Tournament in Indonesia in 2015.
The squad of three, led by Hemant Jalan, lost to champions Bulgaria in the semi-final after beating them once in the league stage in Manado.
"Mukherjee and Majumder have been playing together for the railways and other teams for many years now. They understand each other's game inside out. The team should do well in Lyon," Jalan said.
