The Hindu : Sport : Close finish on the cards

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jun 20, 2007
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Sport

Sport

Close finish on the cards

Principal Correspondent

DINDIGUL: The 45th National ‘B’ chess championship is poised for an interesting finish on Wednesday.

Going into the final round, there is a five-way fight for the title and there are prospects of tough battles for some of the 30 berths for the National ‘A’ championship.

There is no change at the top of the table for the third straight day. M.R. Ventakesh, B. Adhiban, K. Ratnakaran, Sundararajan Kidambi and Prathamesh Mokal have nine points apiece at the end of the 12th round at the PSNA College of Engineering and Technology here on Tuesday.

Half-a-point behind are 17 players who are also sitting pretty as far as qualifying for the National ‘A’ is concerned. There are 16 players with eight points each.

In the final round, Kidambi takes on Venkatesh, Saptarshi Roy meets Ratnakaran, Adhiban plays Akshat Khamparia and Prathamesh faces N. Sudhakar Babu.

In a Ruy Lopez (Arkhangelsk Variation) game on the top board, Venkatesh looked on course for a win with three connected passers. But when he erred under time pressure on his 43rd move, black managed to get perpetual checks with his queen.

Important results: 12th round: M.R. Venkatesh 9 drew with B. Adhiban 9; K. Ratnakaran 9 drew with Sundararajan Kidambi 9; S. Satyapragyan 8.5 drew with Prathamesh Mokal 9; B.S. Sivanandan 8.5 drew with Sriram Jha 8.5; Akshat Khamparia 8.5 drew with R. Arun Karthik 8.5; R. Ashwath 8.5 drew with Shankar Roy 8.5; N. Sudhakar Babu 8.5 drew with Shashikant Kutwal 8.5; Vidit Santosh Gujarathi 8.5 drew with T.S. Ravi 8.5; Ashwin Jayaram 8.5 bt Aditya Udeshi 8; Saptarshi Roy 8.5 bt Swati Ghate 7.5; Nassir Wajih 8 drew with Roktim Bandyopadhyay 8; Ravi Hegde 8 drew with G.B. Prakash 8; Preetham R. Sharma 8.5 bt V. Saravanan 7.5; S.P. Sethuraman 8.5 bt Aarthie Ramaswamy 7.5; M.S. Thejkumar 8 drew with N. Srinath 8; Mehar Chinna Reddy 8 drew with Rahul Shetty 8; Imocha Laisram 8.5 bt Abhishek Das 7.5; M.R. Lalith Babu 8.5 bt D. Lakshman Rao 7.5; P. Konguvel 8 bt Vinay Kumar Matta 7.5; Prasenjit Datta 7.5 drew with Abhijeet Gupta 7.5; Vikramjit Singh 7 lost to P. Shyam Nikhil 8; N. Sanjay 8 bt J. Ramakrishna 7; Swapnil S. Dhopade 8 bt S. Nitin 7; Ankit R. Rajpara 7 lost to C. Praveen Kumar 8; Nisha Mohota 8 bt G.B. Joshi 7; Hemant Sharma 7.5 drew with Ram Prakash 7.5; Saurabh Kherdekar 7 lost to M. Shyam Sundar 8.