INQUIRER Sports

CANADIAN shuttler Charmaine Reid and Germany's Nicole Grether will team up to form a dynamic duo in the women's doubles event of the 3rd Bingo Bonanza Philippine Open Badminton Championships, which kicks off on Wednesday at the Philsports Arena in Pasig City.

Both are considered to be great individual players but hope that their partnership will pay dividends in one of the five categories which will be played in the $120,000 tournament, a four-star or gold event with some of the world's top players competing against one another.

Reid and Grether won the Bahrain International Challenge last December and then reached the semifinals of the Austrian International earlier this year. However, they failed to advance past the last 32 stage of the recent Swiss Open. They hope to bounce back from that disappointing loss in the RP Open, where they will face a host of other top contenders headed by the pair of Meiliana Jauhari and Shendy Iwarati of Indonesia.

The duo from Indonesia are considered to be the top-seeds in the tournament, by virtue of their semis appearance in the Malaysian Super Series last January and a pair of quarterfinal finishes in the Swiss Open and Korea Super Series recently.

Also vying for the crown is the Chinese tandem of Wei Yang and Jiewen Zhang, runners-up in the Malaysian Super Series last January who also had a pair of semifinal stints in the Asian Badminton Championships and Korea Super Series.

Leading the local charge are the pairs of Gelita Castillo and Malvinne Alcala and Fatima Cruz and Emily Gali.

They will be looking to pick up more ranking points to get themselves slots in the 2012 London Olympics. /Correspondent Jonas Panerio