Tejas Ravichandran shocks another Grandmaster

Published Wed, Apr 07 10 07:24 PM

By Our Chess Correspondent Dubai, Apr 7 (PTI) Tejas Ravichandran scored his second consecutive victory over a Grandmaster opponent, defeating local stalwart Salem Saleh in the second round of the Dubai International Open chess tournament here. After a memorable victory against Sergey Volkov of Russia, Ravichandran continued the good work and has thus far recorded the best performance of his young career. Third seed Grandmaster Parimarjan Negi also scored a fine attacking victory over Ghane Shojaat of Iran to be amongst 32 leaders after the second round of the 45,000 USD prize money tournament. The Indians had a decent outing with 2008 World junior champion Abhijeet Gupta also recording an easy victory over Women Grandmaster Myroslava Hrabinska of Ukraine. Parimarjan found faults in black''s position quite early from a French defense opening and went for a direct attack against the king. Shojaat came up with his share of counter play on the queen side but by the time he could get his pieces to strike it was already too late. Parimarjan crashed through the king side with his queen and rook and it was all over for the Iranian. Parimarjan said after the match that at some point he thought black had real counter play. "He (Ghane Shojaat) could have maintained the tension by holding on to his king side instead of letting my pawns roll, in this case the game was dynamically balanced," said Parimarjan, the second youngest Grandmaster ever in the history of the game. Former World Junior girls'' champion D Harika scored a very quick victory to stake her claim as the best woman player in the event. On the receiving end was Abdulrahman Al Yafee of Uae who lost a piece early and never recovered. It turned out to be a good day for under-14 world champion Padmini Rout as she played out a draw with higher rated Grandmaster levan Pantsulaia of Georgia. Up against a Caro Kann defense, Padmini maintained the balance for a long time to force the split of the point. Amongst other Indian in the fray, International Master Eesha Karavade and Ramnath Bhuvanesh went down fighting against the Azerbaijani duo of Gadir Guseinov and Eltaj Safarli. IM Sahaj Grover scored an easy victory against Saleh Naif of UAE while M Shyam Sundar did well to hold Tamaz Gelashvili of Georgia in a complicated affair. .

Source: Web Search