The big guns fired at will but little-known Arjun Kalyan and South Africa’s Anzel Solomans pulled off giant-killing acts on the opening day of the Commonwealth chess championship here.
As predictable in any Swiss-league format, most higher-rated players had an easy time against those from the second half of the ranking list.
Favourite Abhijeet Gupta led the seeds’ march with K. Humpy, defending champion Deep Sengupta and former champion M.R. Lalith Babu following suit.
Even in the various age-group sections, the results followed a predictable script. But Grandmaster Neelotpal Das and former Asian women’s champion IM Tania Sachdev were left to rue their not-so-sound decisions on this day.
The results: Second round: Rakesh Gurung (1) lost to Abhijeet Gupta (2); K. Humpy (2) bt Pratik Patil (1); Chandrasish Majumdar (1) lost to Deep Sengupta (2); M.R. Lalith Babu (2) bt Kiran Manisha Mohanty (1); N. Lokesh (2) w/o Vaibhav Suri (1); Sahaj Grover (2) bt G.K. Monnisha (0); A. Muthaiah (1) lost to Aravindh Chithambaram (2); M. Karthikeyan (2) bt Vipul Subhashi (1); Deepak Katiyar (1.5) drew with Ziaur Rahman (1.5); Deepan Chakkravarty (1.5) drew with R. Ganesh (1.5); Rakesh Kumar Nayak (1) lost to Abhijit Kunte (2); S.L. Narayanan (2) bt J. Saranya (1); Pratyusha Bodda (0) lost to Ankit Rajpara (2); Siva Mahadevan (1) lost to Arghyadip Das (2); Niaz Murshed (2) bt Dhanabir Singh (1).
First round: Abhijeet bt T. Selvabharathy; Soham Datar lost to Humpy; Deep Sengupta bt Vishal Didwana; Ojas Kulkarni lost to Lalith Babu; Vaibhav Suri bt Sanjeet Manohar; Abhinav Gola lost to Grover; Aravindh bt Anish Gandhi; M. Barath lost to Karthikeyan; Ziaur bt Franciois Oberholzer; Vakil Akhtara lost to Deepan; Abhijit bt Ashutosh Kumar; Arjun bt Neelotpal Das; Ankit bt Ritabroto Ganguly; Shubham Kumthekar lost to Narayanan; Arghyadip bt Aansh Gupta.
