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Three top rated TN players lose

Arvind Aaron

Chennai: Three highly rated players from Tamil Nadu lost in the opening round of the Sai Ram Engineering Asian junior chess championship here on Saturday.

FIDE Master S. Nitin (Salem), FIDE Master Shyam Nikhil (Nagercoil), both in boys, and P. Uthra (Chennai) in the girls, were shocked by lower rated fellow Indians.

India, a super power in chess has the World champion in Anand, world junior champion in Abhijeet Gupta and the World Junior girls champion in Harika. Given that we dominate the world, the campaign for the Asian supremacy in juniors should not be a difficult proposition as our players are only expected to retain the titles they won at Mumbai last year.

Top seed International Master S.P. Sethuraman (Chennai) crushed Shiven Khosla (Mumbai) in 33 moves with the black pieces after white did not deploy the knights well. Sethuraman won a rook for knight and was about to checkmate his opponent when resignation happened.

Second seed and world under-16 champion of B. Adhiban (Chennai) lived dangerously with a knight sacrifice for two pawns to win an enterprising 69-move encounter against Upadhyay.

Third seed Deep Sengupta (Kolkata) won a counterattacking 39-move encounter against Shreyansh Daklia.

D. Yashas cornered the king of Shyam Nikhil by trooping in his rook and later brought his queen and bishop to cement the attack.

Easy for Kruttika

In the girls section, top seed Kruttika Nadig (Pune) had an easy 31-move win using the Austrian attack against the Pirc defence of Aparajita.

Second seed Mary Ann Gomes (Kolkata) won in 44 moves but she was certainly too strong for G. Apurva.

Supriya Joshi (Mumbai) scored a 68-move shock win over experienced P. Uthra (Chennai). The Mumbai girl trained by R.V. Gokhale caught the uncastled king of black in the centre to win a rook for knight and the point in a pawn ending.

Sixty-three boys and 32 girls are competing in this edition.

Leading results (round one): Boys: Shiven Khosla lost to S.P. Sethuraman, B. Adhiban bt Anwesh Upadhyaya, J.S. Daklia lost to Deep Sengupta, Ashwin Jayaram bt Tejas Ravichandran, M.G. Gahan lost to P. Karthikeyan, Swapnil Dhopade drew with Pranav Shetty, A.M. Imran (Ban) lost to Shyam Sundar, S. Nitin lost to Shardul Gagare, R.K. Ranjith lost to Lalith Babu, Minhazuddin Ahmed (Ban) bt Niranjan Navalgund, D. Yashas by Shyam Nikhil, Osheen De Silva (Sri) drew with Akshat Khamparia.

Girls: Kruttika Nadig bt Aparajitha Gochhikar, G. Apurva lost to Mary Ann Gomes, Padmini Rout w/o Anjana Pereira (Sri), Antonova Nadezhda (Tjk) lost to w/o Kiran Mohanty, Bhakti Kulkarni bt M. Khushboo, B. Taraswinee drew with R. Preethi, Ch Divyasri bt Supeshala Thilakawardana (Sri), Supriya Joshi bt P. Uthra.

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