Kunte takes match and lead

Grandmaster Abhijit Kunte of India emerged sole leader after the sixth round in the AICF Golden Jubilee International GM open chess championship in Kozhikode on Thursday.

Kunte, who is from Pune, scored a fine victory over his younger rival and leader K Sasikiran. He replaced the Chennai lad, who had 4.5 points from five rounds, at the top.

Six players, GM K Sasikiran, GM P Harikrishna, WGM S Vijayalakshmi, Tahir Vakhidov of Uzbekistan, Marat Dzhumaev of Uzbekistan, Ehsan Maghami of Iran are in second place with 4.5 points.

Sasikiran employed Caro-Kan defence and Kunte adopted Panov-Botvinik attack. Due to black knight isolated from the area of fight, white sacrificed his knight on the 23rd move to rib-open the king side defence and forced GM Sasikiran to resign.

WGM S Vijayalakshmi employed bf4 system against the grun feld defence of sixth seed Tahir Vakhidov of Uzbekistan forced the queen exchange and managed to get a draw by repeatation.

The fight between Andrey Shariyazdanov of Russia against GM Marat Dzhumaev of Uzbekistan ended in Marat's favour.

In the dutch defence Andrey sacrificed a piece for initiative was cleverly tackled by the stubborn defensive technique of Marat which yielded him a point.

Earlier in a fifth round match WGM S Vijayalakshmi shocked third seed Maxim Sorokin. Sorokin had coached Vijayalakshmi for the Asian women's championship in which she had won silver.

Earlier reports:
Sasikiran wins, keeps lead
Sasikiran emerges sole leader