Continuing the sequence of shining bright with white pieces, Vaibhav Suri and G. A. Stany again emerged victorious and led after the 10th round of National chess championship here on Saturday.
Suri, seeded three, scored his fifth victory in as many games with white to reach eight points after facing Anurag Mhamal in a one-sided contest lasting 31 moves.
A day after becoming the country’s latest Grandmaster, Stany kept pace with Suri by posting his fifth triumph with white. He ended the unbeaten run of Deep Sengupta, seeded five, in 39 moves.
Equal battle
In another game involving the remaining two overnight leaders, Tejas Bakre held fourth seed Aravindh Chithambaram in an equal battle lasting 31 moves.
Aravindh and Tejas were joined in the third spot at 7.5 points by Deepan Chakkaravarthy who beat youngster G.B. Haravardhan and C.R.G. Krishna, the conqueror of veteran campaigner Pravin Thipsay.
With three rounds to go, two-time winner Murali Karthikeyan and Sandipan Chanda, seeded two and six, continued their comeback to reach seven points. However, top seed Abhijeet Gupta (6) suffered his second successive defeat. He surrendered with white to former champion G. Akash and stayed at six points.
Following a third defeat, Abhijeet finds himself placed below the other eight single-digit seeds. Rated 2597, Abhijeet can be expected to play hard in the remaining three rounds to make up for the 15 rating points lost so far.
IM norms
The day also saw Bengal’s Srijit Paul and Goa’s Ritviz Parab achieve International Master norms.
Paul, rated a modest 2298, stunned GM S. Kidambi to reach seven points. Parab, armed with a rating of 2338, scored the much-needed victory over seasoned IM Chandrashekhar Gokhale to aggregate six points.
With this, the premier event has so far witnessed a GM norm and four IM norms.
Leading results (10th round):
Vaibhav Suri (8) bt Anurag Mhamal (7); Tejas Bakre (7.5) drew with Aravindh Chithambaram (7.5); G.A. Stany (8) bt Deep Sengupta (7); Deepan Chakkravarthy (7.5) bt G.B. Harshavardhan (6.5); S. Nitin (7) bt Swapnil Dhopade (7); Pravin Thipsay (6.5) lost to C.R.G. Krishna (7.5).
Neelotpal Das (6.5) lost to M. Karthikeyan (7); Abhijeet Gupta (6) lost to G. Akash (7); R.R. Laxman (6) lost to Sandipan Chanda (7).
V.A.V. Rajesh (6.5) drew with Karthik Venkataraman (6.5); Vishnu Prasanna (7) bt Sammed Shete (6); S. Kidambi (6) lost to Srijit Paul (7); P. Shyam Nikhil (7) bt Niranjan Navalgund (6).
