Game on:Abhijeet, right, took 51 moves to outwit Harshit.P.K. Ajith Kumar.
| Photo Credit: P.K. Ajith Kumar
The second day proved a seamless continuation of the first. Nothing unusual happened on the top boards in the second round of the 61st National chess championship at the RPS International School on Sunday.
The only excitement came during the live streaming owing to some technical glitch because of which some extremely unlikely results seemed possible on the top boards. But that, too, was rectified; so, even the boards online said the first four seeds — Surya Shekhar Ganguly, Abhijeet Gupta, S.P. Sethuraman and Diptayan Ghosh — had posted wins. Ganguly, from the white side of a Sicilian Defence, saw his much younger rival Sidhanth Poonja keep playing on from a virtually hopeless position. Black waited till he was checkmated by two queens on the 65th move. On the second board, too, it was Sicilian Defence, but it was an easy win for black. Abhijeet won against Harshit Singh in 51 moves, though in less spectacular style.
On the third board, Sethuraman, who opted for English Opening, punished Esshan Wadhawan for a couple of weak bishop moves early on and registered a 28-move victory.
Important results (second round): Surya Shekhar Ganguly (PSPB) 2 bt Siddhanth Poonja (Kar) 1; Harshit Singh (UP) 1 lost to Abhijeet Gupta (PSPB) 2; S.P. Sethuraman (PSPB) 2 bt Esshan Wadhawan (Del) 1; Kishan Kumar (Bih) 1 lost to Diptayan Ghosh (RSPB) 2; Karthik Venkataraman (AP) 2 bt Yohan Yadav (Tel) 1;
Abhinav Raj (Del) 1 lost to P. Iniyan (TN) 2; Sankalp Gupta (Mah) 2 bt K.K. Chatterjee (Ben) 1;
Subhrajit Dey (Ben) 1 lost to Mitrabha Guha (RSPB) 2; Aronyak Ghosh (RSPB) 2 bt Nimay Agrawal (Har) 1; S. Saisarvesh (TN) 1 lost to N.R. Vignesh (RSPB) 2; N.R. Visakh (RSPB) 2 bt Idu Sheikh (Cht) 1; Arnav Agrawal (UP) 1 lost to Deep Sengupta (PSPB) 2;
Atharv Soni (Mah) 1 lost to M.R. Lalith Babu (AP) 2; Sayantan Das (RSPB) 2 bt Ayaan Garg (Chd) 1;
Prithvi Sharma (Har) 1 lost to Neelash Saha (RSPB) 2.
