Tough going for Tania and Vijayalakshmi

Results followed the form book for the leading names in the field but it was disappointment for two seasoned campaigners — Tania Sachdev and former champion S. Vijayalakshmi, in the Commonwealth chess championship here.

Round Three of the competition produced a series of expected outcomes on Wednesday evening with favourite Abhijeet Gupta heading a 21-player leaders’ pack with ‘perfect’ score.

However, Vijayalakshmi’s search for her old magic hit another roadblock and Tania’s trouble with time-management continued.

For the second successive day, Tania was left with a feeling that she could have executed her plans better only if time was on her side.

But all credit to young Shailesh Dravid, rated at a modest 2086 and 327 points below Tania, who found a way to put the pressure back on the Woman Grandmaster. Tania had no choice but to force a draw by perpetual checks.

Vijayalakshmi, armed with required three Grandmaster norms and currently on a comeback trail, crashed to her second successive defeat after running into Ashutosh Kumar, rated a massive 416 points below at 1926.

Playing white, the 36-year-old Vijayalakshmi encountered a serious kingside offensive from Ashutosh. She had no answer once Ashutosh trained his queen and rook on one of the pawns guarding her castled king. Worse, Ashutosh’s strategically-placed bishop was threatening to join the action and wreck havoc. Before long, Vijayalakshmi resigned.

Former World junior girls’ champion Soumya Swaminathan was another lady not to win as expected. The big-hearted Soumya was all praise for young Nihal Sarin who played the end-game like a veteran and despite down a pawn, forced a draw.

The results: Third round: Abhijeet Gupta (3) bt K. Praneeth Surya (2); Nasir Ahmed (BD, 2) lost to K. Humpy (2); Deep Sengupta (3) bt Sai Vishwesh (2); R. K. Srihari (2) lost to M. R. Lalith Babu (3); Hemant Sharma (2) lost to Sahaj Grover (3); Aravindh Chithambaram (2.5) drew with Krishna Teja (2.5); Niranjan Navalgund (2) lost to M. Karthikeyan (3); Abhijit Kunte (3) bt R. Vaishali (2); Vinay Kumar Matta (2.5) drew with S. L. Narayanan (2.5); Ankit Rajpara (3) bt Dhananjay (2); ArghyadipDas (3) bt Michele Catherina (2); Ajay Krishna (2) lost to Niaz Murshed (BD, 3); Saptarshi Roy (2.5) drew with Ivana Furtado (2.5); Himanshu Sharma (3) bt Srinath Rao (2); Kumar Gaurav (2) lost to Ramnath Bhuvanesh (3); Ravi Teja (2.5) drew with B. Sekar (2.5) (2); N. R. Vignesh (3) bt S. Prasanna (2).