Parimarjan in sole lead after resounding win
Posted: Wed Jan 12 2011, 02:32 hrs
New Delhi
As the competition advances, the top players in the fray are finding the going increasingly tough. While six players shared the lead at the end of the fifth round on Monday, it was local hope and title favourite Parimarjan Negi who shot ahead of the pack on Tuesday, taking sole lead at the 9th Parsvnath international open chess tournament here.
Current national champion Negi beat International Master and compatriot Rahul Sangma in the sixth round. With this, he also remains the only player in the field to have won all his matches in the tournament so far. For Sangma, this was his first defeat of the tournament.
Playing white side of exchange variation of the Ruy Lopez opening, Negi started cautiously, gauging his opponent’s game before going for the kill. Once settled in, he appeared to be in a hurry to finish off the game and showed attacking skills towards the end of the game against his city mate to garner full points after 38 moves.
Meanwhile, another Delhi players in the fray were unable to match Negi and had to settle for half points, after agreeing to draws. Grandmaster and former world junior champion Abhijeet Gupta and International Master Sahaj Grover managed to hold top seed Alexander Areshchenko of Ukraine and fifth seed Slovenian Grandmaster Lenik Luka in their respective sixth round encounters.
Playing black in Grunfeld defence, Areshchenko signed the peace treaty with Gupta in identical 38 moves while Grover and Luka agreed to split points in just 21 moves. In other sixth round encounters, Grandmaster S Arun Prasad beat International Master Himanshu Sharma while West Bengal youngster Diptayan Ghosh held Grandmaster S Kidambi.
More here.
He’s coming to his own now. He can be the next Anand.
The Negi-Sangma battle was the second between the players in five weeks. Negi, armed with two straight victories over Sangma, started as an obvious favourite. But all credit for Sangma for giving nothing away to the Grandmaster out of the opening phase. In a complicated middle-game, both players had reasons to be optimistic in an apparently unclear position.
With both players running behind time before the first time control, Sangma maintained check-mating threats on Negi’s castled king. Negi did gain a pawn but it was Sangma’s erroneous rook-move on the 36th turn that proved decisive.
Later, in an unusually long game, lasting 193 moves to be precise, Tamil Nadu’s Shyam Nikhil checkmated Nepal’s Sujendra Prasad Shrestha after five hours and 20 minutes.