Sandipan holds top seed Bacrot

Gibraltar: Grandmaster Sandipan Chanda fought with gusto to hold top seed Etienne Bacrot but Koneru Humpy went down to Michael Adams in the fifth round of the Gibetelcom Masters chess tournament now underway here.

Among others, Grandmaster GN Gopal capitulated before Jan Gustafsson of Germany, International Masters Eesha Karavade and Tania Sachdev posted easy victories, D Harika and V Saravanan did well to hold higher ranked opponents, while Kruttika Nadig went down fighting. After another hard-fought round, Adams and Gustafsson now lead the race with 4.5 points apiece. The top board battle between Sandipan Chanda and Etienne Bacrot started with an interesting line of the Nimzo-Indian and it was an entertaining game where the former played white. Sandipan fell under some troubles and benefited when Bacrot did not find the best moves in a complicated position. It was a level position soon in the middle game that eventually petered out to a draw. Humpy, on the other hand, employed the Petroff defence with black pieces against Adams and misjudged her strategy at a very early stage, giving the English grandmaster exactly the sort of positional advantage which suited his style. Adams had a bit of trouble extricating his pawn-snatching knight from the opponent’s position but played carefully to pocket full point. Like Adams, Gustafsson gained a big advantage from the opening and even thogh Gopal fought hard, a line of advanced white pawns became menacing in fairly quick time. Tania Sachdev had a relatively easy day against Hans Groffen of Holland. Playing white, Tania got a good position out of her queen pawn opening and romped home. Harika held a much higher opponent in Vallejo Pons with white pieces and the Indian played a compact game throughout. Saravanan, meanwhile, got another good result holding Cramling in a Slav defence game with white pieces. PTI