Gandhidham, October 13: Manav Thakkar of PSPB Academy has been given the pride of place in the seeding list of the Sub-Junior Boys, but he makes his appearance only tomorrow, though the main draw events in the Indian Oil National Ranking (West Bengal) Table Tennis Championships begins at the Kachchh Indoor Stadium here later tonight.

Manav, the winner of the Central Zone championships at Indore last week, will be joined by other top seven seeds, including No. 2 Jeet Chanda of West Bengal. The No. 3 slot has gone to Anukram Jain of PSPBA while Gujarat’s Manush Shah is placed at No. 4

All the eight seeds along with next best from among the qualifiers, based on their national ranking, have been given first-round byes and they will play from the second round of the main draw tomorrow.

Earlier in the day, the group matches threw up some topsy-turvy results with at least a half dozen group toppers failed to live up to their reputation and bowed from making it to the main draw.

As for the hosts, who had had entered five boys only two survived to make the main draw cut. Soham Pandya won both his matches against A Advait from Telangana and Maharashtra’s Ritvik Nagle by an identical margin of 3-0 to take the top position in group 7. Similarly, Kaushal Bhatt benefited from a couple of walkovers in his group 36 but he had to beat Ramalingam Iyer of Maharashtra. The Gujarat boy exactly did that in a tough battle to win the match 3-2 to qualify from the group.

Walkovers also helped Rohan Choksi from Tamil Nadu making grade as he had to play a lone match against Gujarat’s Chitrax Bhatt in a four-member group 39. Choksi beat Bhatt 3-0 and that was sufficient to see him through.

Tanmay Rane of Maharashtra, Chandrasekharan from Karnataka, who won two matches, Ayush Dayal from Haryana, Mohammad Inush from Kerala all made it to the main round to join the rest from other groups. In all there were 40 groups in the sub-junior boys section with only the group topper qualifying.

The girls’ sub-junior group matches are underway along with the Cadet Boys and Girls qualifiers. Their main draw too is slated to be completed tonight as all four medals will be decided tomorrow evening.