Satyapragyan, Jha win in contrasting styles

By Our Sports Reporter

NEW DELHI, APRIL 19. The top two seeded players, S. Satyapragyan and Sriram Jha, won their second round matches in contrasting styles to lead the field in the NIIT all-India Open rating chess championship at the Delhi Public School, R. K. Puram here on Thursday.

While the No. 1 seed Satyapragyan (2) dismissed a beginner without much strain, Jha (2) was faced with an sticky opponent in Gagan Behl, who stretched the second seed to almost two-and-half hours.

Behl started the game with a rarely-played opening, Kings Indian Reversed, and Jha took his own time to solve the problem. Behl played passively in the opening, but Jha earned advantage on the 20th move. He centralised all his pieces and converted the game into Kings Indian attack to win in 31 moves.

Third seeded Nassir Wajih (2) opted for irregular opening and was a queen up by the eighth move against H. P. Sharma. Then it was fairly easy for Wajih to quell the challenge of Sharma.

Vishal Sareen (2), the No. 5 seed, cashed on an opening mistake by Hemant Kumar after having opened the game with Ruy Lopez closed. The opening mistake forced Hemant on the backfoot and he resisted nicely after losing a bishop. The youngster resigned after 30 moves when left with knight-bishop and three pawn against bishop-rook three pawns of Sareen.

In a Pirc defence, Neeraj Mishra forced Gita Sareen to make a mistake as early as on the sixth move. Gita went for two- knight variation and ended giving up bishop for the knight. Mishra made use of H8a1 diagonal bishop as the black broke through on the queen side. Gita resigned on the 17th move when she lost the queen.

Verghese Koshy had an easy game against rookie Garima Gupta. Playing with black, Koshy opted for Sicilian defence and Garima started offering material right from the opening. Koshy grabbed everything and checkmated Garima on the 23rd move.

Important results: S. Satyapragyan (2) bt Gaffar Ali (1); Gagan Behl (1) lost to Sriram Jha (2); Garima Gupta (1) lost to Verghese Koshy (2); Vishal Sareen (2) bt Hemant Kumar (1); K. C. Joshi (2) bt K. B. L. Srivastava (1); Kapil Gupta (1) lost to V. S. Negi (2); Geeta Sareen (1) lost to Neeraj Mishra (2); Harsh Goel (1) lost to Vedant Goswami (2); Himanshu Malhotra (1) lost to S. Kherdekar (2); Suman Kumar Singh (2) bt Kaushal Gupta (1); Kartik Dhar (1) lost to B. V. Prakash (2); Naman Grover (1) lost to D. S. Negi (2); Harish Sharman (2) bt Pallavi Dutta (1); P. N. Shukla (1) lost to Ravi Khanna (2); Saket Sharma (2) bt Parveen Bhardwaj (1); Prabhu Dass (1) lost to Abhijit Gupta (2); Rajesh Kumar (2) bt Pradeep Nag (1); Amarnath I. (2) bt Gaurav Radhakrishan (1); Ritesh Gupta (1) lost to Abhi Ram (2); Anand Khare (2) bt Rishika Jairath (1); Anirudh Agarwal (2) bt S. Arun (1); Sanjay Kumar (2) bt Ankit Soodh (1); Nassir Wajih (2) bt H. P. Sharma (1); Surender Kumar (2) bt Kamal Singh (1); Ishmad D. Dou (1) lost to Santosh Kumar Sinha (2); Jitender Rawat (1) lost to Prathmesh Mokal (2); Pramod Kumar Singh (2) bt Karan Duggal (1); Rahul Kumar Mangalore (1) lost to Pradeep Pathak (2); Chander Pal (2) bt Mohd. Idris (1); V. Rajit (2) bt Pawan Kumar (1); Pradeep Solanki (1) lost to Bishwajit Roy Chaudhary (2); Praveen Karnwal (2) bt Prajal Phukan (1).

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