Ballygunge: If a trip to the Eden Gardens was a no-brainer for cricket enthusiasts this weekend, a Ballygunge banquet was the place to be for bridge aficionados.

Chowdhury House was the venue for the second edition of Atul Chandra Chowdhury Memorial Bridge Tournament in association with The Telegraph, a two-day event that ended on Sunday.

"The term mind game is used for several sports but there is no bigger mind game than bridge," said Partha Sarathi Mukherjee, 52, one of the players. A joint secretary in the state government's development and planning department, Partha Sarathi has been playing competitive bridge since 1987.

Twenty-eight teams of six - four players and two reserves - competed in duplicate bridge in the weekend tournament, organised by the West Bengal Bridge Association. In duplicate bridge the same hands are played successively by different partnerships. The teams represented clubs, individuals and sponsors.

Kamal Krishna Mukherjee, 76, one of the oldest players, is a retired Calcutta Port Trust official who took up the game in 1965 and was in the Indian team that finished fourth at the Bridge Olympiad in Venice in 1988, a watershed moment.

"Till then, the game was mostly limited to upscale private gatherings," said Partha Sarathi.

Sagnik Roy, 21, and Sayantan Kushari, 20, were among the youngest participants. Sagnik, a Howrah resident, picked up the game from his father, a railway employee. Ditto for Sayantan, whose father Pritish Kushari has represented the country several times. The duo were part of the Indian team that made it to the quarter-finals of the Junior Open World Championships in Lyon in August.

"The tournament is a tribute to my grandfather who always patronised sports," said the tournament's host, Kalyan Chowdhury, grandson of Atul Chandra Chowdhury.

The team led by Badal Das, a familiar name in the circuit, won the tournament.