Saravanan stuns Grand Master

Saravanan faced the closed Sicilian Variation from the Grandmaster and the game developed into a positional struggle where white had a passively placed high square bishop.

At a point, the Grandmaster was forced to sacrifice an exchange and Sarvanan immediately sacrificed a pawn to start a mating attack on the white king. Movsziszian tried to complicate the position in mutual time scramble but gave up on the 38th move when faced with mate. Saravanan moves on the four points.

Another Indian to move on to four points is IM Sasikiran who scored a marathon 82-move win over unrated Joseph Sanchezy of Spain. In a slow defense game, Sasikiran wasunder pressure for the most of the time in the middle-game and finally turned the tables in an interesting endgame where he had two rooks and knight against his opponent’s queen. Sanchezy lost on time.

Neelopal Das (3.5) faced the Caro Kann from Gim Izeta and went on finding neutralising moves to salvage a draw from a rook and pawn ending.

Konguvel (3.5) and Roktim Bandyopadhyay (3) scored smooth victories over lowly rated Pes Mateo and Marco Catala respectively but Rahul Shetty (2) blundered in a superior position and lost to Ramos Fernandez of Spain.

Important results: GM Spassov (3) lost to GM Giorgadze (4); GM Granda Zumga (4) bt IM Ruslan Pogerelov (3); GM Davor Komljenovic (3.5) drew with GM Lev Psaktns (3.5); GM A Kuzmin (4) bt WGM Znaogin Peng (3).