Ajay Santhosh joins leaders Sasi, Aronyak in National Chess Championship

The sixth round of the 62nd National Chess Championship in Guntur saw a four-way tie at the top, with Abhijeet Gupta and 15-year-old IM-elect Ajay Santhosh Parvathareddy joining overnight leaders Sasikiran Krishnan and Aronyak Ghosh at 5.5 points.

Hyderabad: The overnight leaders Sasikiran Krishnan of Petroleum Sports Promotion Board and IM Aronyak Ghosh of Railways Sports Promotion Board have been joined in the lead by former national champion Abhijeet Gupta of PSPB and the 15-year-old IM elect Ajay Santhosh Parvathareddy of Uttar Pradesh with 5.5 points each at the end of the sixth round of the 62nd National Chess Championship, organised by Andhra Chess Association at the Vignan University (Guntur) on Saturday.

Sasi and Aronyak settled for a draw.

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In the Najdorf variation of the Sicilian defence Abhijeet Gupta unleashed a series of attacks against Goa IM Audi Ameya to deny the castling chances by the latter. Abhijeet ripped open the opponent’s flanks and Audi resigned when he could not find any place to hide his king.

IM-elect Ajay Santhosh Parvathareddy of U.P. chose to play Pirc defence against Aaditya Dhingra of Haryana. Leaving a rook and five pawns each, Ajay’s king had a long walk to move to the other side of the board to capture the pawn. His two connected passer pawns forced Aaditya to resign after forty four moves.

In a Reti opening, Viresh Sharnathi of Maharashtra paid the penalty for not moving his minor piece for the entire game of 23 moves, that too against the top seed P Iniyan of Tamil Nadu. On the other hand, Iniyan’s pieces were very active. The both caged knight and rook of Viresh brought his downfall.

Emulating Carlsen’s style of winning drawn games, Surya Sekhar Ganguly of PSPB did a Houdini act today to extract half a point from a seemingly lost game. He and Ravi Teja of Railways exchanged their queens on the 22nd move in a game arising from Queen’s Gambit Declined by Ravi.

Ganguly made a minor mistake in exchanging his rook for a knight, which did not pay any dividend, handing over a winning position to Ravi. However, Ravi Teja failed to convert the rook vs bishop endgame, allowing Ganguly to heave a sigh of relief by adding half a point to his tally.

Grandmasters Deepan Chakkravarthy of ICF and GM Lalith Babu of PSPB had a quick draw of 30 moves.