Sport - Chess

Negi, Shyam Nikhil share lead

ZAMBAULIM (Goa): Fierce battles, a few surprise results and an encouragingly low percentage of draws on the leading boards made it a fascinating fifth round of the 56th Monginis National ‘B’ chess championship here on Thursday. None of the three draws on the top 14 boards was friendly in nature on a day when Grandmaster Neelotpal Das and defending champion Prathamesh Mokal lost in contrasting manner.

When the dust settled, 15-year-old top seed Parimarjan Negi and an extremely fortunate Shyam Nikhil shared the lead with all-win records. Rarely have two sub-juniors occupied the top board in the history of this premier event.

Playing a younger opponent for the first time in the championship, Negi decimated 13-year-old promising talent Vidit Gujarati in 31 moves.

Shyam, fighting to salvage a draw from a seemingly hopeless position, cashed in on Mokal’s desperation to force the issue and emerged a surprise winner in 79 moves in the longest game of the day.

Fourth seed Neelotpal suffered his first loss after running into Karnataka’s B.S. Shivananda, the top-rated untitled player in the country three years ago. The 32-year-old’s rating may have fallen from a high of 2467 to 2328, but his experience could not be beaten on this day as he posted a crushing victory in 32 moves.

Shivananda’s statemate and ninth seed M.S. Thejkumar, however, crashed to shock defeat at the hands of Maharashtra’s Arjun Tiwari. The country’s oldest GM at 49, Pravin Thipsay, produced glimpses of his vintage best in carving out a 62-move victory over International Master Rahul Shetty. The veteran shares the third spot with 10 others on 4.5 points.

Second seed R.R. Laxman, fresh from winning the top-board gold medal in the recently-concluded World Railways Games, showed that he had not recovered from Wednesday’s loss and drew with Shreyansh Daklia, rated over 300 points below.

The results: Fifth round: Parimarjan Negi (5) bt Vidit Gujarati (4); Prathamesh Mokal (4) lost to Shyam Nikhil (5); B.S. Shivananda (4.5) bt Neelotpal Das (3.5); Shyam Sundar (4) drew with G. Rohit (4); Deep Sengupta (4.5) bt Ram Prakash (3.5); Rahul Shetty (3.5) lost to Pravin Thipsay (5).

M.S. Thejkumar (3.5) lost to Arjun Tiwari (4.5); Anup Deshmukh (4.5) bt P.D.S. Girinath (3.5); B. Adhiban (4) drew with Praveen Kumar (4); S. Satyapragyan (4) drew with Ram S. Krishan (4); Saptarshi Roy Chowdhury (3.5) lost to Prasenjit Datta (4.5); Sekhar Sahu (3.5) lost to P. Karthikeyan (4.5); Akshayraj Kore (4.5) bt Debashis Das (3.5); G.B. Prakash (4.5) bt R. Premnath (3.5); Suvrajit Saha (4) drew with S. Mari Arul (4); Rahul Sangma (4.5) bt Manoj Panigrahi (3.5); E.P. Nirmal (4) drew with Sudhakar Babu (4); M.R. Lalith Babu (4.5) bt Vaibhav Suri (3.5); Shreyansh Daklia (3.5) drew with R.R. Laxman (3.5); M.R. Venkatesh (4) bt Vikas Sharma (3); Sriram Jha (4) bt Imocha Laisram (3); K. Narayanan (4) bt S.P. Sethuraman (3); Hemant Mandhare (3) lost to B.T. Murali Krishnan (4); Saptarshi Roy (4) bt Gurpreet Singh Maras (3).

J. Sridhar (3) lost to Swapnil Dhopade (4); Aniruddha Deshpande (3) lost to Vikramaditya Kamble (4); Sayantan Das (3.5) drew with Dinesh Sharma (3.5); Vishnu Prasanna (4) bt Malleswara Rao (3); Rajib Dhar (3.5) drew with J. Ramakrishna (3.5); Fenil Shah (3.5) drew with G.B. Joshi (3.5).

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