Humpy maintains lead, Deepan excels at 'A' Nationals

Visakhapatnam, Apr 7 (UNI) Grandmaster Koneru Humpy, continued her hold on to her lead, despite having a bye in the sixth round of the National 'A' Chess Championship at Visakhapatnam, here today.

Humpy leads the field with 5.5 points and her show points to a similar lead run in Calicut two years back. In another crucial game, former Asian Junior Champion and International Master Deepan Chakkravarthy defeated IM Sundararajan Kidambi and inched closer to Humpy at 5.0 points.

In the seventh round that is in progress, Grandmaster R B Ramesh did not risk playing the big battle against the in-form Andhra star and took a short draw with Humpy.

Earlier in the day, it was the Kunte-Deepan game that held the limelight, as the Madurai youngster went all out against the experienced Indian Oil star. The Queens Gambit Declined Tartakower variation game went on the lines of Abhijeet Gupta-Arun Prasad game played a few days back. Kunte found himself on the backfoot as Deepan unleashed a novely and managed to draw the game by the skin of his teeth.

In the women's section, the tournament leader WGM Swati Ghate went down to Kerala girl Nimmi George. In the Open Ruy Lopez game, an over ambitious Swati went for an early sacrifice but Nimmi rallied her two knights for the defence. In the ensuing ending, the Kerala girl used her extra piece and extracted a full point from Swati.

The Results : Men (Round 6) D P Singh (4) beat M S Thej Kumar (1.5), Sriram Jha (2) lost to Sandipan Chanda (3), M R Venkatesh (3.5) beat D K Sharma (1.5), B S Sivanadan (2.5) drew with R B Ramesh (3.5), Abhijit Kunte (3) drew with Deepan Chakkravarthy (4), S Kidambi (4.5) beat V Kamble (1.5), Abhijeet Gupta (3.5) beat P D S Girinath (1), Himanshu Sharma (2) lost to Arghyadip Das (2.5), S S Ganguly (4) beat Arun Prasad (3), Lanka Ravi (1) lost S R Chowdhury (3.5), Koneru Humpy (5) Bye.

The Results : Women (Round 5) Kiran Monisha Mohanty (3.5) lost to Swati Mohota (1.5), J E Kavitha (1.5) drew with Ramya Krishna (3), Swati Ghate (4) lost to Nimmi George (3), Anupama Gokhale (1) drew with Iswarya Shobana(2.5), Supriya Maji (2) lost to Alka Das (2.5), Aarthie Ramaswamy (2) drew with Amruta Mokal (2.5), S Vijayalakshmi (2.5) lost to Eesha Karavade (3), S Meenakshi (2) lost to Mary Ann Gomes (4), D Harika (2) drew with Nisha Mohota (2), Sowmya Swaminathan (0.5) Bye UNI XC PM RS2242