Three share the lead in
National 'A' chess

International Master S S Ganguly (IOC), Pendyala Harikrishna and C S Gokhale (Indian Airlines) shared the lead at the end of second round in Bharat Petroleum 39th National 'A' Chess championship in Nagpur on Friday.

Harikrishna, who beat Pravin Thipsay on Thursday, asserted his class while playing black in his game against IM P Konguvel. He played the razor sharp Pelican defence and sacrificed a pawn to get a strong bishop posted on e5. Konguvel, who grabbed the pawn later, returned it looking for a draw in the endgame.

However, Harikrishna played rook and pawn ending to win on the 53rd move. Although both players queened simultaneously, Konguvel found that the mate was unavoidable and resigned.

IM R B Ramesh (IOC) and IM Ganguly played the Ruy Lopez game in which the latter was saddled with weak pawns on a6 and d6. However, Ramesh failed to utilise the advantage and instead lost a pawn in a tactical stroke. Ganguly then gave Ramesh no chance and won comfortably in 44 moves.

In another game, P Magesh Chandran played the opening badly against C S Gokhale and got into minus position as early as 10th move. The rest was technique and Gokhale duly collected his second win of the meet.

The second round was marked by a spate of draws and as many as five games ended in draws, all of them hard-fought.

IM Neeraj Kumar Mishra (TISCO) easily accounted for IM V Sarvanan. The latter offered a draw on 16th move which Mishra spurned and won comfortably on the 31st move.