Ganguly, Sandipan shine in Fujairah

Fujairah (UAE): Grandmasters Surya Shekhar Ganguly and Sandipan Chanda settled for a quick draw and shared first place along with Alexander Moiseenko of Ukraine in the Fujairah International open chess tournament that concluded here.

Having done the hard work in the previous rounds, the Kolkata-based practice partners had no reason to look for more as a tie for the first place was almost assured with the drawn result in their mutual game. There was an added incentive for Ganguly after the ties were resolved as he had the best tie-break score among three players tied for the top slot. The Indian rose back to form from this tournament and stands to gain around 20 rating points which certainly is a huge gain at present level. Sandipan finished third overall after a bad start and was also visibly pleased with his excellent results that included victories over the top two seeds - Baadur Jobava of Georgia and Liem Le Quang of Vietnam. The hard work was done in the penultimate round played last night by the Indian duo as Sandipan accounted for Quang while Ganguly crushed Mikheil Mchedlishvili of Georgia. The two along with Sergey Fedorchuk of Ukraine shared the lead on six points apiece and the Ukrainian went down to Quang in the final round. The three joint winners scored 6.5 points in all and got a little over USD 10,000 apiece as prize money for their efforts. Ganguly started the tournament with three wins and remained in joint lead throughout the tournament. Earlier in April, Sandipan had also finished joint first in the Dubai International open and after this performance here it looks as though UAE has become one of his favourite hunting ground. The other Indians did not do well. Highest rated Indian in the fray, Abhijeet Gupta played out two draws in the last two rounds against Ivan Saric of Croatia and Zaven Andriasian of Armenia respectively to finish on 5.5 points and shared the tenth spot. PTI