Ganguly beats Gupta in Fujairah Chess

Grandmaster Surya Shekhar Ganguly outwitted higher rated compatriot Abhijeet Gupta to maintain a clean slate after the end of the second round of Fujairah International Chess tournament on Friday.

Fujairah (UAE): Grandmaster Surya Shekhar Ganguly outwitted higher rated compatriot Abhijeet Gupta to maintain a clean slate after the end of the second round of Fujairah International Chess tournament, here today.

Ganguly, who had been recently struggling with his form, played a consistent game to get the better of his former World junior champion opponent and capitalised on a blunder in the endgame to jump to two points from as many games in the super-strong open tournament. Apart from Ganguly, GM Sandipan Chanda was the other notable Indian winner at the expense of International Master V Saravanan. The USD 50,500 prize money tournament finds no 2700 rated players among the leaders as all four have dropped a half point now. Top seed Baadur Jobava of Georgia had to sign peace with Gadir Guseinov of Azerbaijan while Etienne Bacort of France achieved the same result against Solak Dragan of Turkey. Second seed Liem Le Quang of Vietnam was in for a bigger surprise as he was outdone by Andrey Sumits of Ukraine and the latter now finds himself in a five-way lead with an absolute score. The other leaders are Ganguly, Yu Ruiyuan of China, Vladislav Tkachiev of France and Yaroslav Zherebukh of Ukraine. A pack of 17-players follow the five leaders a half point behind and this list includes most of the big-wigs of the tournament including Jobava, Bacrot, Alexander Moiseenko of Ukraine and the lone Indian in Sandipan Chanda. The other Indians aspirants again had mixed results. Debashish Das went down fighting against Moiseenko who played black while Vishnu Prasanna was not good enough against Tigran Petrosian of Armenia. Even Akshat Khamparia, who showed much promise in the opener, could not tackle the effective play by Ni Hua of China. PTI