Sai Vishwesh nails Narayanan, joins Tejas Bakre in lead

Sai scripted the biggest sensation of the event, so far, by bringing down second seeded GM S. L. Narayanan in 35 moves on the second board. Tejas won, as expected, against local challenger Aradhya Garg in 40 moves.

Sai performed more like a Grandmaster by sacrificing a bishop on the 19th turn and trading a rook for a knight just five moves later.

Tamil Nadu-boy C. Sai Vishwesh and Grandmaster Tejas Bakre remained with perfect scores after four rounds of the Amity National Challengers chess championship here on Monday. The day, that produced some close fights, witnessed six drawn encounters on the top-eight boards. Once the dust settled down, Sai and Tejas emerged as the two frontrunners.

Sai scripted the biggest sensation of the event, so far, by bringing down second seeded GM S. L. Narayanan in 35 moves on the second board. Tejas won, as expected, against local challenger Aradhya Garg in 40 moves. Sai’s execution of the winning plan, following the opening lines of Sicilian Morra Gambit, was truly brilliant considering his rating of 2281 was way below Naryanan’s 2515. In fact, Sai performed more like a Grandmaster – by sacrificing a bishop on the 19th turn and trading a rook for a knight just five moves later.

This left Sai with a queen and rook against Naryanan’s queen and the rook-pair. But the calculated risk taken by Sai worked well as he managed to drive Narayanan’s king into a checkmating net. Tejas had it easy in Ruy Lopez exchange variation when he trapped Aradhya Garg’s rook on the 40th move. Much later, top seed Aravindh Chithambaram’s plans of joining the two leaders was thwarted, in 68 moves, by a determined Harsha

Bharathakoti, rated 199 points below.

The results:

Fourth round: Aravindh Chithambaram (3.5) drew with Harsha Bharathakoti (3.5); Sri Vishwesh (4) bt S. L. Narayanan (3); Shardul Gagare (3.5) drew with M. Kunal (3.5); Tejas Bakre (4) bt Aradhya Garg (3); Sriram Jha (3.5) drew with Vinayak Kulkarni (3.5); Pradip Ghosh (3.5) drew with Mehar Chinna Reddy (3.5); Abhishek Kelkar (3) drew with Abhijit Kunte (3); Neeraj Kumar Mishra (3) drew with Himal Gusain (3); Vikramaditya Kulkarni (2.5) lost to Surya Praneeth (3.5); R. R. Laxman (3.5) bt Arun Rathi (2.5); K. Srikanth (2.5) lost to Ravi Teja (3.5); Sidhant Mohapatra (3.5) bt S. Nitin (2); V. Vishnu Prasanna (2.5) drew with G. B. Joshi (2.5); V. Varshini (2) lost t N. Srinath(3); G. Akash (3) bt Sudhir Kumar Sinha (2).

Third round: Ramnath Bhuvanesh (2) lost to Aravindh (3); Narayanan (3) bt Mary Ann Gomes (2); Aradhya (3) bt Vishnu Prasanna (2); Kunte (2.5) drew with Vikramaditya Kulkarni (2.5); Chandra Prasad (2) lost to Shardul (3); Akash Iyer (2) lost to Tejas (3); Suvrajit Saha (2) lost to Jha (3); Nitin (2) lost to Sai Vishwesh (3); Ravi Teja (2.5) drew with Mohapatra (2.5); Mehar Chinna Reddy (3) bt C. S. Gokhale (2); Vinayak Kulkarni (3) bt Somak Palit (2); Abhilash Reddy (2) lost to Harsha (3); V. A. V. Rajesh (2) lost to Ghosh (3); Kunal (3) bt Preet Sheth (2); Gusain (2,5) bt Rahul Gurung (2).