Sengupta beats Gopal,takes sole lead at Asian Junior Chess tourne

New Delhi, Nov 11 (UNI) Grandmaster norm holder Deep Sengupta snatched the lead from overnight leader G N Gopal beating him in a battle of nerves in the sixth round of the Asian Junior and Girls Under-20 chess championship here today.

Sengupta took his tally to five points out of a possible six for the sole lead.

Close behind is a pack of six players -- top seed GM Nguyen Ngoc Truongson of Vietnam, GM norm holder Abhijeet Gupta, G Rohit, S P Sethuraman, Ashwin Jayaram and M Shyam Sundar all of whom have 4.5 points each.

In the girls' championship being organised simultaneously, top seed Woman Grandmaster Hoang Thi Bao Tram of Vietnam proved to good for International Master Kruttika Nadig on the top board while it was a tough call for National Junior girls' champion Soumya Swaminathan who went down to Kiran Manisha Mohanty.

As things stand in this section, both Kiran and Hoang have five points apiece, and with just three rounds to come, Mary Ann Gomes, P Lakshmi Sahiti and Amruta Mokal is right behind them with 4.5 points apiece in their bags.

It turned out to be a bad day for Gopal who, after drawing his fifth round game, was clearly not in his elements and Sengupta came up with a slightly off-beat handling of the Sicilian defense as white gave Gopal an easy middle game.

However, subsequent planning spelt doom as he lost a pawn in the ensuing endgame. Things were far from easy for Sengupta even at this stage but Gopal made another error leading to a won position for his opponent after 59 moves.

Among the other Indians in the fray, Aswin Jayaram played solidly to hold Truongson who played black while G Rohit and Sethuraman split the point after a tense battle.

In the girls' section Hoang gave a positional lesson to Kruttika in a Caro Kann defense game where the former played black. The game lasted 35 moves.

The event is played under FIDE's Swiss rules and there are nine rounds in all. The championship selects the best Asian boy and girl under-20 years of age.

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