Cholleti Sahajasri of Race Academy (AP) caused the only major upset in the women’s second round on the second day when she held WGM Mary Ann Gomes of Airports Authority of India (AAI) even as her team lost to the defending champion 1-3 in the National team chess championship for men and women at Kotla Vijaya Bhaskara Reddy Stadium here on Thursday.
The 2006 Commonwealth under-20 gold medallist from Karimnagar with an ELO rating of 2041 surprised the experienced Mary Gomes (ELO 2394) on the top table of the first board.
For the AAI, which saw its star player GM Dronavalli Harika take a break today, there was another surprise for it when a relatively lesser known Anigani Kavya also drew with the experienced Nimmy George.
Easy for PSPB
In the men’s first round, favourite and top-seeded Petroleum Sports Promotion Board and second-seeded Railways ‘A’ had an easy day.
PSPB, which fielded all the Grandmasters today except the former world junior champion GM Abhijeet Gupta, scored a 4-0 win over Madhya Pradesh, while Railways got the better of a lowly-rated Bihar with a similar margin.
Interestingly, third-seeded AAI preferred to field young guns against Services Sports Control Board which saw it concede half-a-point when IM G. Stany had to settle for a draw against K. Srikanth before wrapping it up with a 3.5-05 margin.
The results:Men: First round: PSPB bt Madhya Pradesh 4-0 (B. Adhiban bt Manish Joshi; S. P. Sethuraman bt Nikhilesh Kumar Jain; M. R. Lalith Babu bt G. Ankit; Deep Sengupta bt Anshuman Singh).
Bihar lost to Indian Railways ‘A’ 0-4 (Rakesh Ranjan lost to Swapnil S. Dhopade; P. K. Singh lost to Arghyadip Das; Vishal Vikee lost to R. R. Laxman; Rajesh Ranjan lost to Somak Palit).
AAI bt SSCB 3.5-0.5 (V. Prasanna Vishnu bt K. V. Ramani; G. A. Stany drew with K. Srikanth; Swayams Mishra bt L. Dhanunjaya Rao; V. A. V. Rajesh bt Kuldeep Singh).
Raghav’s Foundation lost to Indian Railways ‘B’ 0-4 (J. Sai Agni Jevetesh lost to Himanshu Sharma; S. Khan lost to Akshat Khamparia; Raghav Srivastava lost to K. Ratnakaran; Kandi Ravi lost to Saptarshi Roy).
Air India bt Hyderabad 4-0 (S. Satyapragyan bt S. V. Ramanajucharyulu; Tejas Bakre bt J. R. C. Prasad; Chandrasekhar Gokhale bt M. Y. Raju; Rahul Shetty bt Sk. Saidulu).
Women: Second round: AP lost to AAI 1-3 (Ch. Sahajasri drew with Mary Ann Gomes; Hinduja Reddy lost to Padmini Rout; Anigani Kavya drew with A. Nimmy George; V. Toshali lost to R. Bharathi).
Air India bt LIC 3-1 (Tania Sachdev bt S. Vandana Bandodkar; Bhakti Kulkarni bt Swathi Ghate; Subbaraman Vijayalakshmi bt Kiran Manisha Mohanty; Aarthie Ramaswamy bt Manjul Shrivastava).
Tamil Nadu lost to PSPB 0-4 (V. Varshini lost to Rucha Pujari; R. Vaishali lost to Nisha Mohota; S. V. Priya Sathya lost to Sowmya Swaminathan; P. K. Kavitha lost to M. Mahalakshmi).
