The third season of the Premier Badminton League, which begins on Saturday, will be an eight team affair with eight current World Championship medallists and nine Olympic medallists, including three multiple medal winners, showcasing their skills over the next three weeks.
The tournament, which will be played across five venues, has the world’s top-ranked men’s and women’s singles players. The league will kick off in Guwahati with Saina Nehwal’s Awadhe Warriors taking on PV Sindhu’s Chennai Smashers. The final would be played in the home town of India’s biggest stars — Hyderabad — after making a journey through Delhi, Lucknow and Chennai.
The semifinals will be held on January 12 and 13 and the final on January 14.
The competition will follow a best-of-three, 15-points format – a single point will decide the winner at 14-14.
The most exciting feature of the tournament is the Trump Match, in which a team gets a bonus point if they win that particular match while a loss fetches a negative point. A player/pair can be nominated for the Trump match only twice in the league stage and only once in the knock-out stage.
All eight teams will only play five matches in the group stage and the top four teams will make the semi-finals. The top four teams will be determined by the number of points won and not the number of ties won.
Unlike last year, where fielding two Indian players in a match was mandatory, this time only one Indian player will be enough. According to sources, this has been done on the request of the teams as they wanted more flexibility in deciding the line-up for the matches.
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