Indore, October 6: Forty players, including a lone paddler from Madhya Pradesh, made the main draw cut in the sub-junior boys section of the National Ranking (Central Zone) Table Tennis Championships, being conducted at Abhay Prashal here today.

Of the 40 who qualified for the main draw, Petroleum Sports Promotion Board players topped the list with nine of them going through while the next best effort came from West Bengal as seven of their sub-junior boys. Maharashtra had six with Delhi one less. The newly-formed state of Telangana on their maiden appearance saw three of their boys qualifying for the main draw.

The lone boy from the host state was Tanmay Choukse who topped his group 23, winning his matches against Kaustubh Kulkarni of Karnataka 3-0, but losing to Rohan Choksi of Tamil Nadu 1-3. Tanmay, however, made the grade on 4:3 ratios after a three-way tie in the group.

Otherwise, it was an easy affair for most group leaders with fewer exceptions as Jayabarta Bhattacharjee from North Bengal, despite being the third player in group 16, beat his AP and Maharashtra rivals Sai Deepak Admalla and Vipul Nandkar by the same margin of 3-0 to top the group.

In another case, North Bengal’s Siddhant Roy too managed to post two straight 3-0 wins over MR Thangsiansanga (Mizoram) and Karan Kukreja (Maharashtra) to take the top position in group 22. Delhi’s Shub Goel benefited from a walkover from UP’s Adarsh Sristava even as he beat Jyoti Hamya Dutta of PSPB 3-1 to finish on top of group 27.

Though all these qualifiers, except the leaders of the first eight groups, will play their first round matches tonight while the others have been given a bye each. Their action will begin only from tomorrow where they will be joined by the top-eight players.

The to eight who got a direct entry into the main draw include Manav Thakkar (PSPB), Snehit Fidel Rafeeqie (Tel), Jeet Chndra (WB), Shaurya Pednekar (Mah), Sarthak Seth (UP), Sohan Bhattacharya (WB), Ashwin Subramanian (Mah) and Manush Shah (Guj) in that order, based on their rankings.