Rai, a trainee at the Vertex Sports Academy, is playing his first tournament.

National champion Siddhartha Anand, who will shortly be leaving for England to take up professional snooker coaching assignment, scored an easy win over his opponent.

Each match is best-of-five game affair. A total prize money of Rs 25,000 is on offer in the tournament. The event, open to players of all categories, is being played on the knock-out format. This is for the first time that trainees at the Vertex Sports Academy are playing in the pool tournament.

Other Results: Gagandeep Singh bt Gaurav Verma 3-0, manish Anand bt Anish Narang 3-0, R Deep bt Varun Giri 3-0, Magan Preet bt Aditya Gupta 3-0, Amit Gupta bt Gaurav Bahl 3-2, Ankur Madan bt Atul Khurana 3-2, Gaurav Parwanda bt Rajinder Singh 3-2, Akash Maheshwari bt Preet Singh 3-1, Nitin Taneja bt Kapil Kumar 3-1, Harjee Singh bt Amit Arora 3-1.

CBSE Table Tennis: As many as 40 teams, including defending champions Delhi Public School, NTPC (Vidyut Nagar, Ghaziabad) and Dayawati Modi Public School (Modinagar) will battle it out in boys and girls sections in the second Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) cluster 3 table tennis championships at Ryan International School, Noida, from Thursday.