Sport - Sports : General

India-Armenia chess series

NEW DELHI: The champions of tomorrow from India and Armenia face-off in the inaugural three-round Friendship chess (under-21) series beginning at the Russian Centre here on November 30.

World junior champion Abhijeet Gupta (rated 2,536), fellow Grandmaster S. Arun Prasad (2,530), International Masters G. Rohit (2,457), World boys (under-16) champion B. Adhiban (2,439) and reserve player Deep Sengupta (2,438) form the Indian team. Action will be held on four boards on each of the three days.

Armenia’s strong four-player squad comprises former World junior champion GM Zaven Andriasian (2,561), GM Hrant Melkumyan (2,541), Avetik Grigoryan (2,513) and Samvel Ter-Sahkeyan (2,495).

A brainchild of Armenia’s Ambassador Ashot Kocharian, the series is likely to be an annual event and a prelude to a possible series between the National teams of the two nations.

“In Armenia, everyone plays chess, much like the way Indians play cricket,” said Mr. Kocharian here on Thursday.

“Viswanathan Anand recently won the biggest title in the game and our National men’s team has retained the won the Chess Olympiad title two days ago.

“So at present, the two nations hold the two big titles. Since our President is also the head of our chess federation, I am sure we can work towards having a series between our National teams,” said the chess-loving Armenian Ambassador.

Vidya Jain School beat Modern School by six wickets in the G.C. Mittal Memorial cricket tournament to win the M.L. Sharma Trophy on Friday.

The scores:

Modern School 175 in 41.3 overs (Dhruv Shorey 55, Unmukt Chand 52) lost to Vidya Jain School 176 for four in 33.4 overs (Nitish Rana 45, Nakul Sharma 44).

At Gurgaon, Inderjit Singh scored three goals as Indian Oil thrashed CRPF 12-1 in a quarterfinal league match of the 19th Lal Bahadur Shastri hockey tournament on Friday.

Apart from Inderjit (eighth, 52nd and 67th minutes), Deepak Thakur (10th and 56th), V. Raghunath (42nd and 47th) and Hamza Mujtaba (54th and 70th) struck a brace each.

Prabhjot Singh (24th), Rajpal Singh (28th) and Bharat Chikara (37th) netted once each in the goal feast.

Amritvir Singh (46th) scored the consolation goal for CRPF.

Other results:

BPCL 2 (Sabu Varkey 8, Jaknail 27) bt South Central Railway 1 (Mayank James 32).

ONGC 2 (Amit Bhargav 20, K.H. Jayanta Meitei 26) bt Namdhari XI 1 (Malak Singh 3).

Air India 1 (Sandeep Singh 67) drew with Punjab National Bank 1 (Jalwinder Singh 70).

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