Indians dominate at Commonwealth Chess Championship

New Delhi: Grandmaster Abhijeet Gupta and International Master Tania Sachdev continued their winning ways to be in joint lead with 19 others after the third round of the Parsvnath Commonwealth Chess Championship.

Apart from former world junior champion Abhijeet, Grandmasters Sriram Jha, Tejas Bakre International Masters Tania Sachdev, D Harika are also in the leading pack with perfect scores. Abhijeet and Jha beat Bangladesh Fide Masters Ahmed Minazuddin and Mehadi Hasan while Tania and Harika got the better off Puneet Jaiswal and Prasenjit Dutta respectively. Earlier in the second round, Nagpur based Gurpreet Singh Maras held Grandmaster Anton Kovalyov of Argentina to a creditable draw while Azerbaijan Grandmaster Eltaj Safarli had the same fate against Vikramjit Singh. Delhi youngsters Hemant Sharma and Prince Bajaj held International Master B Adhiban and Grandmaster Abhijit Kunte respectively.Vaibhav Suri drew with fourth seed Russian Grandmaster Dmitry Kokarev at Clarks Inn, Pacific Mall, NCR. Playing with black pieces in Sicilian Defence, Kokarev agreed to sign peace with his younger rival in 39 moves while Bajaj forced Kunte to split the point after 45 moves.Top seed Alexey Dreev of Russia had another easy day in the office as he outwitted Ramnath Bhuvanesh in the third round outing while his Russian counterparts Dmitry Bocharov and Pavel Maletin beat GA Stany and Woman Grandmaster Nisha Mohota respectively. In other surprising results in the third round, Vikramjit Singh held third seed GM Anton Kovalyov of Argentina while International Master Anup Deshmukh held Kazak Grandmaster Rustam Khusnutidionov and International Master MR Lalith Babu had to be satisfied with half point against G B Joshi. Bureau Report