Eight players share lead

By R.Anantharam, International Arbiter & Media Incharge

Untitled Indians are in the forefront, as three of them R. Sidharth of Tamil Nadu, Ankit Rajpara of Maharashtra and Anwesh Upadyaya of Orissa lead with four points each, along with three foreign grandmasters and two Philippino international masters at the end of the fourth round of the LIC & ONGC sponsored Chennai Open 2010 international chess tournament, organized by Sports Promotion Foundation at the Multipurpose Indoor Stadium, Chennai today. Ankit Rajpara continued his good show beating M.S. Thej Kumar, international master from Karnataka and Anwesh accounted for another IM Anup Deshmukh of LIC.

On the top board, Maxim Turov employed his favourite Caro Kann defence against P. Shyam Nikil of Tamil Nadu, a former under 17 national champion. Maxim gained a pawn on the 17th move and capitalized an unnecessary knight sacrifice by Shyam on the 23rd move. Shyam resigned fourteen moves later. In an equal position arising from a Queens Gambit Declined game, former under 25 national champion B.T. Muralikrishnan of Railways played a weak f3 move against Ziaur Rehman of Bangladesh on the second board. Eleven moves later, Murali lost a pawn and soon the game also.

Delhi youngster Vaibhav Suri upset the apple cart of GM Pavel Kotsur of Kazakhstan in a French defence game by handling his knight and rook well.

Marat Dzhumaev of Uzbekistan played a steady game against Vikramaditye Kamble of Railways and gained a minor piece in the process. Both marched their pawn to the seventh rank, but Marat’s rook was better placed and Kamble’s rook could not prevent his opponent’s pawn from promotion. Marat won in 43 moves.

The day belonged to Ankit Rajpara again. In a queen and equal pawn ending, Ankit’s b- pawn raced towards the eighth rank, when Thej surrendered. Anwesh forced Anup to lose his knight and threatened to queen the pawn. Anup resigned when he was about to lose one more pawn. Top seeded Eshan Ghaem Maghami of Iran again conceded a draw to Arun Karthik of Chennai to reach 3 points. Highly rated GM, S. Arun Prasad of PSPB had to be content with a draw against Chennai’s young player S. Kaushik.


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Home                                               Published on January  27^th , 2010