Sasikiran draws again, slips in the ranking

Indian Grandmaster K Sasikiran failed to break his win-less sequence as he was held to a draw by Sergey Karjakin of Ukraine in the fourth round of the premier tournament of Hastings International Chess Congress here.

The other Indian in the fray GM P Harikrishna split points with the oldest competitor GM Vitaly Tseshkovsky of Russia to maintain his second position in the competition. GM Peter Heine Nielsen (3.5) of Denmark defeated GM Glenn Flear of England to stretch his lead to a full point while Harikrishna and Sasikiran tallied 2.5 and and 2 points respectively after four matches each.

GM Alexei Barsov of Uzbekistan and GM Keith Arkell of England share the second spot with Harikrishna while the fourth successive draw pushed Sasikiran to the joint fifth position along side world women’s championship runnesr-up Alexandra Kosteniuk of Russia.

The match between Harikrishna and Tseshkovsky saw the latter, playing white, opened with the king pawn and embarked on scotch opening game. The Russian played the middle game quite fiercely and he had a definite advantage in terms of space.