Other well-known names vying for top honours are Michael Ferreira, Subhash Agarwal, Devendra Joshi and the United Arab Emirates' number one player Mohammad S Jokar.

A notable absentee this year is defending snooker champion Sonic Multani, who has opted out of the Rs 3.3-lakh prize-money event.

For the first time, the event moves out of the Cricket Club of India (CCI) owing to the renovation of the club's billiards rooms.

The players have been drawn into four groups of five players each in both billiards and snooker events with the top two from each group in the two events making it to the knock-out quarter-finals.

Group A seems to be toughest of all in billiards with the likes of Sethi, Nalin Patel,Ferreira, Jagtiani and Rupesh Shah. Incidentally, Shah was the winner at the Garware Club House billiards tournament which was a prelude to the Om Agarwal event.

The league matches would be played over two hours (billiards) and seven frames (snooker), the quarter and semi-finals over three hours (billiards) and nine frames (snooker).

The billiards final would be played in two sessions of two hours each and the snooker final would be a best-of-11 frame event.

SPECIAL AWARD: Arvind Savur will be the recipient of the Alpic Life Time Achievement Award. The award instituted in 1995 to honour a sportsperson each year who has made outstanding contributions to the game, includes a silver plaque and a purse of Rs 50,000. The three time national snooker champion has won the national billiards title once. He even held the world record for the highest break of 556 in 1980.

GROUPINGS

Billiards Group A: Geet Sethi, Nalin Patel, Michael Ferreira, R Jagtiani, Rupesh Shah; Group B: RoxtonChapman, B Bhaskar, A Agarwal, CH Shah, Kamal Tulshan; Group C: Devendra Joshi, Alok Kumar, M Rehani, Yasin Merchant, Dhruv Sitwala; Group D: Ashok Shandilya, Subhash Agarwal, M Kothari, Siddharth Anand, Omar Balsara.

Snooker Group A: Devendra Joshi, Manan Chandra, Mohammed Jokar, Subhash Agarwal, Rupesh Shah; Group B: Ashok Shandilya, R Habib, Nalin Patel, M Shahab, Siddharth Rao; Group C: Alok Kumar, Siddharth Anand, Roxton Chapman, A Saboo, Kamal Tulshan; Group D: D Lily, Yasin Merchant, Geet Sethi, Amit Khansaheb, Varun Taneja.

MULTANI MYSTERY

Sonic Multani might have called it quits. This was hinted by Subhash Agarwal while addressing newspersons last night.

Multani, the defending snooker champion here, was quoted as having said that he has stopped playing snooker. "I had a talk with Sonic over the phone and this is what he told me," disclosed Agrawal.

When asked wether Multani would never play again, Agarwal replied: "Maybe. He was leaving forthe United States when I talked to him over the phone."