Humpy crashes out of world meet

In the tiebreaker, Humpy drew the second game after losing the first game despite having a stronghold with black pieces.

It was a Sicilian Dragon by transposition where Humpy, white, throughly confused her opponent and won a piece in the opening itself in the drawn game.

However, as the endgame surfaced, the 17-year-old pre-tournament favourite could not sustain the tremendous pressure and paved way for the Russian to get a theoretically drawn endgame that lasted till the 67th move.

Kovalevskaya did well to hold her position once she was out of real danger and after the exchange of queens took place, she retained her winning chances.

Humpy eventually saw a similar finish to that of her first loss, and was a rook down in the end. Kovalevskaya clinched the issue in 68 moves.

In the other semifinal, Grandmaster Antoaneta Stefanova of Bulgaria ousted former world women champion Maia Chiburdanidze of Georgia.

Maia was earlier also restricted at the semifinal stage in last world championship in 2001 at Moscow against champion Zhu Chen of China.