Girl wonder of green baize

Anupama Ramachandran is the big sensation on the green baize in Chennai. Late last month, she won the under-16 World Snooker Championship in Russia and since then she has been on a roll in the Tamil Nadu state ranking tournaments too.

Brought up in the Mylapore Club, Anupama has been given a membership in the Tamil Nadu Billiards and Snooker Association Club too on the strength of her strerling performances.

The standard XI Vidya Mandir School student was at her best in Russia winning all her matches in the league stage and comfortably bagging the title too. She won the State sub-junior, junior and ladies titles recently to add to her World crown. Coached by N Suryanarayanan and encouraged by the State association, she is all set to participate in the Nationals in Bengaluru and the Open 6-Red Nationals in Chennai, both in December. In a freewheeling chat with DT Next, Anupama talks about her big career wins, future plans and how she got into the green baize.

World U16 Open Snooker championship was an inaugural event hosted by the Federation of Billiards Sports of Russia in October 2017 at St Petersburg.

It was a round robin league qualifying to play the top 12 knock-out format.

I won all the round robin matches, without losing a frame. I was the 2nd seed and given bye in the first knock out match. In the quarterfinals I beat Alexandra Riabinina of Russia and in the semi-final, I beat Albina Leschuk of Belarus without losing a frame in both the matches. In the finals, I played my compatriot and top seed Keerthana Pandian from Bangalore. After winning the first two frames, I lost the third frame in which she played very well and I focused to win the 4th frame with the score at 3-1 in the final of best of five frames.

I practise three to four hours a day and this includes solo practice and frames, both billiards and snooker. My Coach and mentor N Suryanarayanan spends untiring time with me both at home and at Mylapore Club.

My school (Vidya Mandir) has been very supportive right from my initial days into the game, granting me permission to play in tournaments at state, national and international levels.

My teachers take special efforts to help me catch up on portions, when I do not have tournaments. I scored 9.6 out of 10 in CBSE X standard. It was an honour when I was made the torch bearer during the School Sports day and when my Principal announced my achievement at the school assembly.

I live in a closely knit joint family and all 12 members have supported me in every possible way. After I came runner-up in the State ranking tournament of 2015, my parents decided to put a snooker table at home to improve my practice time – this required a lot of relocation within the house and all elders willingly came forward to moving upstairs, though it meant that they would have to climb two stairs. In fact, when I returned from Russia with the World Cup, my entire family was at the airport to receive me! In the summer of 2014 when we had not planned a vacation my parents wanted to put me in a coaching camp to spend the summer vacation.

Given a choice between chess and snooker, the latter was my choice since many of my friends were into Chess and I wanted to do something different — plus snooker being played in an air-conditioned room was an added attraction during summer!

After the summer camp was over, the game continued to interest me and I continued with the Mylapore Club coaching sessions. It was a slow progress for a year with just two classes a week of 3 hours with more kids my age in the batch — the individual attention was a challenge. I also lost some time due to a fracture in my hand, followed by a vacation to the USA. It was from August 2015 I spent more time on the table at Mylapore Club on my own with my father’s assistance and subsequently had a table at home in February 2016.