Delhi,29 Nov(PTI): Grandmaster and former world junior champion Abhijeet Gupta outclassed Fabien Libiszewski of France to jump to joint fifth position after the end of the third round of the Qatar Masters International Chess tournament here today.
After a tame draw with Xu Jun of China in the previous round, Gupta came firing on all cylinders in the third round and Libiszewski did not have a chance once he ventured in to unknown territories. The victory helped Gupta reach 2.5 points out of a possible three.
It’s a four-way tie at the top of the tables and leading the pack is top seed Grandmaster Anish Giri of Holland who defeated Ivan Ivanisevic of Serbia to maintain his all-win record. Joining Giri in lead was Evgeny Tomashevsky of Russia, Nils Grandelius of Sweden and Mikhailo Oleksienko of Ukraine.
On what turned out to be a very tough day for the Indian contestants in the fray, highest-rated Indian Grandmaster P Harikrishna suffered a shock-defeat at the hands of Mikhailo Oleksienko. It was a bad day for Harikrishna in general as he got outplayed from a level position.
After doing pretty well for the first two days, Indian Grandmasters Neelotpal Das, Ankit Rajpara, Sandipan Chanda, Surya Shekhar Ganguly and M Shyam Sundar all lost against respective opposition to remain on 1.5 points out of a possible three.
In fact, apart from Gupta only Aravindh Chithambaram and B Adhiban were the only Indians who ended on the winning side in the third round. Chithambaram defeated Zeinab Mamedyarova of Azerbaijan while Adhiban opened his account at the expense of Markus Lammers from Germany.
Such is the strength of the world’s strongest open tournament that India’s latest Grandmaster Murali Karthikeyan and International Master Sayantan Das are still sitting on zero points, after losing their third game in a row.
