New Delhi, 31 Oct: Indian Grandmaster Harsha Bhara-thakoti held top-seeded compatriot and GM R Pragg-nanandhaa to a draw in the sixth round of the Open section to remain in sole lead with 5 points in the Asian Continental Chess champio-nship here on Sunday.
\nThe Bharathakoti-Praggnanandhaa match ended in 33 moves with the two players agreeing to a draw. It halted the four-match winning run of Bharathakoti.
\nA group of 11 players, including the No.1 seed Praggnanandhaa, Leon Luke Mendonca, Karthikeyan Murali, Kousatav Chatterjee, S L Narayanan, B Adhiban, S P Sethuraman and Aravindh Chithambaram (all from India) were half a point behind the leader.
\nThe others with 4.5 points are: Saparmyat Atabeyev and Maksat Atabayev (both Turkmenistan) and Shamsiddhin Vokhidov (Uzbekistan).
\nIn other key results, Mendonca drew against Sethuraman, Karthikeyan Murali and Adhiban shared honours, while Vokhidov split the point with Maksat Atabayev.
\nThere were wins for Narayanan and Chitham-baram over Sandipan Chanda and Ayush Sharma respectively which allowed them to climb to 4.5 points.
\nSaparmyat Atabayev registered an important win, beating Rinat Jumabayev in round five to improve to 4.5 points.
\nIn the women’s event, India’s WGM P V Nandhidhaa wore down compatriot Priyan Nuttaki in 61 moves to move to 5.5 points and into the sole lead after six rounds.
\nNuttaki and Padmini Rout, who beat Nilufar Yakubbaeva (Uzbekistan), are in second place with 4.5 points.
\nNine players share the third place with 4 points. They include Indians Rakshitta Ravi, Soumya Swaminathan, Nisha Mohota, Divya Deshmukh, Vantika Agrawal and Mary Ann Gomes among others.
\nIn important sixth round results, Agrawal scored over C Sahajasri and Mohotoa beat Xeniya Balabayeva, while Deshmukh was held to a draw by Soumya Swami-nathan.
\nTop-seeded Indian Tania Sachdev could not break through the defences of young WIM Saina Salonika and was forced to share the point. Sachdev has 3.5 points and is placed 18th. (PTI)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Harsha Bharathakoti remains in top spot New Delhi, 31 Oct: Indian Grandmaster Harsha Bhara-thakoti held top-seeded compatriot and GM R Pragg-nanandhaa to a draw in the sixth round of the Open section to remain in sole lead with 5 points in the Asian Continental Chess champio-nship here on Sunday. The Bharathakoti-Praggnanandhaa match ended in 33 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-203732","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}