Sixteen-year-old Grandmaster Aryan Chopra topped a seven-way tie at 6.5 points to finish an impressive third in the Abu Dhabi Masters chess championship here on Tuesday.
In the final round, the 35th-seeded Delhi boy stunned 15th-seeded Georgian Levan Pantsulaia to finish behind winner, seeded seeded Egyptian Baseem Amin (7.5) and runner-up, top seed Nigel Short (7).
Another youngster N.R. Vignesh finished 10th with six points, way ahead of S.P. Sethuraman (15th), M. Karthiyan (18th), Abhimanyu Puranik (19th) and Shardul Gagare (20th).
Leading results (involving Indians): Ninth round: Mircea-Emilian Parligras (6.5) bt Abhimanyu Puranik (5.5); Levan Pantsulaia (Geo, 5.5) lost to Aryan Chopra (6.5); Constantin Lupulescu (Rom, 5.5) drew with N.R. Vignesh (6); S.P. Sethuraman (6) bt Saveliey Golubov (Rus, 5); Nihal Sarin (5.5) drew with Robert Hovhannisyan (Arm, 5.5); Mohammad Mmuradli (Aze, 5) lost to M. Karthikeyan (6); Dennis Wagner (5.5) drew with Shardul Gagare (5.5).
Sevag Mekhitarian (Bra, 6) bt Al Muthaiah (5); Abhijeet Gupta (5.5) bt Arya Omidi (4.5); Aleksandar Indijic (Geo, 5) drew with P. Iniyan (5); D. Harika (5.5) bt David Eggleston (Eng, 4.5); Rahul Sangma (4.5) lost to Neelotpal Das (5.5); Vantika Agrawal (5) bt Raja Harshit (5); Artur Davtyan (4.5) drew with Eesha Karavade (4.5); Tania Sachdev (4.5) drew with Aditya Mittal (4.5); Kumar Gaurav (4.5) bt Raunak Sadhwani (3.5) .