Meanwhile, on the adjoining table, Shandilya who stunned Sethi in the Asian Games final, defeated A.Haque of Orissa 869-398. The players seemed somewhat affected by the uncertain timings which were a result of the Billiards and Snooker Federation of India's executive committee meeting. Many players were attending the meeting as representatives of their state associations. Since the meeting got delayed, it affected the programme.

Sethi began patchily and that allowed veteran Subhash Agrawal to run upa handy lead early in the match. Agrawal had a 144 on the tenth visit and Sethi an 86 on the sixth. But Agrawal's break of 40s and then 50 on the 28th and 54 on the 30th gave him alead which threatened to knock out Sethi. After 30 visits, it was 440-303 in Agrawal's favour and there were just about 35 minutes left.

Then, Sethi turned in a courageous performance under pressure and with breaks of 78 on the 35th, 91 on the 37th and 117 on the 38th he turned the table and moved ahead. Agrawal was not only left off the table, but he was not able to build anything substantial in between.

Shandilya had breaks of 111 on the seventh and 120 on the 15th besides small but useful breaks as he outplayed Haque. Earlier, in the last of the league matches, Simachalam of Railways shocked ME Jokhi of Gujarat 559-234 to qualify for the pre-quarters. Jokhi was knocked out as Alok Kumar topped the pool.

The remaining six pre-quarter match ups are: Alok Kumar v Rupesh Shah; Shyam Jagtiani v Arun Agarwal; Mohd. Asim v Nitin Kohli; Harish Gandhi v Prem Prakash; Devendra Joshi v Simachalam; Arvind Savur v B Bhaskar.