Daijiworld Media Network - Mangalore (SP)
Mangalore, Jul 24: Five players, GM Praveen Thipsay of Maharashtra , IM B T Muralikrishnan of Southern Railway(SRly), C Praveen Kumar of Tamilnadu (TN), Thejkumar of South Western Railway and Shivananda of Karnataka share lead with 5 ½ pts each, at the end of sixth round of the third Mangalore FIDE-rated open chess tournament here.
On the first board, B T Muralikrishnan of SRly and Praveen Kumar of TN drew their individual encounter in a 25 move Modern Benoni game, after frequent exchange of pieces.
The second board saw IM Thejkumar sitting pretty behind the white pieces against Viani. Thej was successful in restricting the mobility of black pieces to certain extent, by using the Bayonet Attack of the Classical King’s Indian .But Viani played admirably against his higher-rated opponent. Thej overlooked the black’s exchange of 17…cd5, which put his advantage questionable. After some fluctuating middle game, Thejkumar wound up the game in 50 moves. GM Thipsay was back into the contention with a win over Sohan Phadke, who overstepped the time limit in a seemingly equal position.
Shivananda overcame some stiff resistance from Kaushik on the fourth board. Playing the Alekhine defence from the black side, Shivananda had to maneuver dynamically to create weakness on his opponent’s camp. Kaushik lost a pawn in the 34th move, to make it worse and lost the game in 58 moves.
Top seeded IM Laxman outsmarted IM Ravi Hegde in a Catalan game. In an equal piece ending of Queen, Rook, Bishop and pawns, Laxman’s Bishop proved better than its counterpart.
On the seventh board, in the game between Vijay Keerthi and Rathnakaran, the former enjoyed some advantage with white pieces. A blunder on the 17th move by Vijay caused the downfall of his bishop and the game went into black’s favour