The Hindu : Humpy begins with a draw

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 18, 2002

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Sport - Chess

Humpy begins with a draw
By Amitabha Das Sharma

KOLKATA, MARCH. 17. Koneru Humpy stumbled at the first block of her final Grand Master norm drawing against Bangladeshi FIDE Master Enamul Hussain in the inaugural day of the XIII Goodricke international Open chess tournament here at the Gorky Sadan on Sunday.

In her game, Humpy went for the Karo Cann defence and encountered problems in developing her queenside pieces initally against Hussain. She, however, worked on her problem and was a pawn up at one stage but the game steered into a drawish opposite colour bishop ending with the rooks still on the board. Hence, a peace treaty had to be signed.

Humpy's compatriot Rahul Shetty caused a major upset beating the Russian GM Ruslan Sherbakov. Shervakov had a kingside space advantage against Shetty's Nimzo-Indian defence but same inaccuracies on the part of the Russain allowed latter to counter-attack and vanquish his fancied opponent in the 51st move.

Another Indian who did well was IM V. Saravanan, who held the third seeded Slovenian GM Drazen Sermek to a draw in 14 moves in a centre-counter defence.

India's Sandipan Chanda, looking for his third GM norm, bungled the opening in the Nimzo-Indian and handed the initiative to Sundarajan Kidambi, who made no mistakes and went on to win the game in 60 moves.

Top seeded GM Aleksei Aleksandrov of Belarus played his favourite Berlin Defence against India's Ponnuswamy Konguvel's Ruy-Lopez. Konguvel's exchange of central pawn cost him dear as the Belarus GM went a pawn up and wraped up the game in 45 moves. Russian GM Alexander Motiliev used a home-brewed line against his Indian opponent Lanka Ravi's French defence. Ravi slipped into trouble overlooking a bishop capture on c2. Motiliev went on with the advantage and won the game with a rook sacrifice.

At the end of the first day 17 players netted full ponits while 20 players were in the second spot with half points while the 16 are yet to score. The tournament presented a hallowed field with 19 Grand Masters, a lone Woman Grand Master - in Koneru Humpy - 12 International Masters, four Woman International Masters and three FIDE Masters to complete a list of 39 titled players. Added to this, there are 13 untitled rated players and one unrated player for a total of 53 players.

The results: Ponnuswamy Konguvel (Ind) 0 lost to Aleksei Aleksandrov (Blr) 1; Aleksander Motliev (Rus) 1 bt Lanka Ravi (Ind) 0; V. Saravanan (Ind) 0.5 drew with Drazen Sermek (Slo) 0.5; Evgeny Gleizerov (Rus) 0.5 drew with Joerg Blauert (Ger) 0.5; Dinesh Kumar Sharma (Ind) 0.5 drew with Sarunas Sulskis (Ltu) 0.5; Pavel Kotsur (Kaz) 1 bt Swati Ghate (Ind) 0; Saptarshi Roy Chowdhury (Ind) 0 lost to Krishnan Sasikiran (Ind) 1; Alexey Kuzmin (Rus) 0.5 drew with T.S. Ravi (Ind) 0.5; S. Satyapragyan (Ind) 0 lost to Arsen Yegiazarian (Arm) 1; Maxim Sorokin (Arg) 1 bt Suvrajit Saha (Ind) 0; P.D.S. Girinath (Ind) 0 lost to Aleksander Goloschapov (Ukr) 1; Ruslan Sherbakov (Rus) 0 lost to Rahul Shetty (Ind) 1; Enamul Hussain (Ban) 0.5 drew with Koneru Humpy (Ind) 0.5; Yogesh Gore (Ind) 0 lost to Alexander Fominyh (Rus) 1; Andrey Seriyazdanov (Rus) 1 bt Aarthie Ramaswami (Ind) 0; K. Visweswaran (Ind) 0.5 drew with Sergei Ovsejevitsch (Ukr) 0.5; Bogdan Lalic (Eng) 1 bt Vikramjit Singh (Ind) 0; Deep Sengupta (Ind) 0 lost to Dibyendu Barua (Ind) 1; Ehsan Ghaem Maghami (Iri) 1 bt Nisha Mohta (Ind) 0; R.B. Ramesh (Ind) 0.5 drew with Mohammad N. Al-Sayed (Qtr) 0.5; Somak Palit (Ind) 0 lost to Abhijit Kunte (Ind) 1; Tejas Bakre (Ind) 0.5 drew with Sriram Jha (Ind) 0.5; Sundarajan Kidambi (Ind) 1 bt Sandipan Chanda (Ind) 0; G.B. Prakash (Ind) 1 bt Wang Zi Jing (Mas) 0; Saheli Dhar Barua (Ind) 0.5 drew with P. Mahesh Chandran (Ind) 0.5; Abdulla Al-Rakib (Ban) 0.5 drew with Rahul Sangma (Ind) 0.5; Bye - Krishna Thapa (Nep).

Bangladesh's Enamul Hussain watches India's Koneru Humpy make a move in the the inaugural day of the XIII Goodricke international Open chess tournament in Kolkata on Sunday.

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