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Blunders at crucial time proved expensive for Kunte and Ramesh
Written by content team on 04.11.2006
In all-GM battle of the Semifinals, the tactical fights between Ganguly and Ramesh produced a surprisingly one-sided victory for the top seeded Ganguly while Kunte and Bakre fought out long positional games in the Semi-finals of the Poona Club Knockout Rapid Chess Tournament being held at here at Pune. Also what turned out to be a day of blunders saw players finally showing signs of tiredness from the exciting but stressful Knockout Rapid format, as Ramesh and Abhijit made uncharacteristically huge blunders to hand over victories to their opponents.
Both Ganguly and Kunte started the matches with White pieces, and steered the games into their favourite territories. While Ganguly entered into wild complications from the word go, Abhijit preferred a solid approach to the middlegame, nursing a minute advantage out of the opening.

Ramesh decided to repeat Venkatesh’s strategy against his Indian Oil colleague Ganguly in the Quarterfinals and went for the wild Marshall Attack of the Ruy Lopez in the first game. But unlike Venkatesh, he preferred to keep the Queens and tried to stroke up an attack against White’s Kingside. Following a topical variation which was curiously employed by the Indian sensation Parimarjan Negi just a few days ago at a Rapid Tournament in Cape D’Age, France, Ganguly’s position looked promising when suddenly Ramesh made a terrible blunder on the 28th move and resigned on the 30th move when faced with the loss of a Rook.

In the second game, Ramesh employed his favourite Be2 setup of the Sicilian Scheveningen with White pieces and Ganguly equalized comfortably to achieve a position without any problems by early middlegame. A probably disheartened Ramesh looking for tactical complications committed a couple of mistakes on the 27th & 28th moves to lose a Bishop and the game in 30 moves. Thus, after surviving scares in the previous two rounds, Ganguly finally produced a clean 2 – 0 sweep of Ramesh.

Abhijit Kunte (Indian Oil) with pieces faced his own favourite Nimzo Indian Defence played against him by Tejas Bakre (Indian Airlines) in the first game of their match, and entered an Ending where he had a slight edge due to his control of the d-file. Both kept exchanging pieces at regular intervals, and Abhijit achieved good control of the position with the White Rook entering into the 7th Rank with the strategical advantage of a good Knight against a bad Bishop. Just when the local spectators were getting excited about his position, he apparently misplayed the ending to allow equality and the draw resulted in 77 moves.

Tejas Bakre decided to tread carefully even with White pieces in the Second game, and opted for an irregular setup of a Queen Pawn Opening. Play proceeded quite slowly with pieces exchanging at regular intervals. Though Kunte tried to complicate the game by bringing his Queen out to the Kingside, Tejas kept balance by controlling the c-line, and the game ended in a draw in 31 moves.

In the Blitz tie-break 10 minute games, an obviously tired Abhijit with White pieces, in his wont to create complications, blundered a Knight on the 17th move and resigned the next move, enabling Tejas to play the last game with White pieces with the advantage of White pieces. Again Abhijit tried his best and complicated the game and won a Pawn, and when the capacity crowd was expecting a turn-around in the match, he once again blundered a piece to get into a lost position. Though he fought well to create chances, the game ended in mutual mistakes and finally a draw in 60 moves, thus in a triumph for Tejas. He will play Ganguly on Sunday, after a free day tomorrow.

No major upsets in Quarterfinals.
Written by content team on 03.11.2006
  The local fans were delighted with the first round of the day, as their favourite Abhijit Kunte of IOC defeated the CPAI President and comrade Dibyendu Barua (TISCO) in the first game of their encounter. In a Cambridge Springs variation of the Queen’s Gambit declined, Barua was forced to part with an exchange in the middlegame, and was forced to defend the Bishop versus Rook endgame with a pawn each for both the sides. Barua missed drawing chances pointed out by IM Kidambi and resigned on 87th move when faced with material loss or checkmate. Thus under pressure, Barua still preferred his favourite Guico Piano setup with White pieces in the reverse game, and kept on pushing for a slight edge in a Queenless middlegame. The game went into a Knight ending where Barua looked to be pushing for an advantage but Kunte kept his nerves and defended accurately to finally clinch the draw and win the match with a score of 1.5 – 0.5.

In a classic match-up between youth and experience, R.B.Ramesh (IOC) exhibited a keen sense of breakthrough to outwit fellow Grandmaster Pravin Thipsay of Union Bank, Mumbai in their first encounter. In Thipsay’s favourite Ruy Lopez Chigorin System, Ramesh broke through Black’s Kingside with a delightful Queen offer on move 69, and finished the game off by once again with a Queen sacrifice and checkmate. In the second game, it was Ramesh’s turn to employ the Ruy Lopez with Black pieces, and Thipsay made inaccuracies in the Opening itself allowing Ramesh to wrest the initiative. The game ended quickly on the 31st move in when Thipsay threw in the towel faced with certain defeat in the Rook Ending.

Grandmaster Tejas Bakre (Indian Airlines) enjoyed a positional advantage against K.Rathanakaran (Southern Railway) in a French Defence Classical variation. Though Tejas seemed to be pressing for an advantage throughout the game, it fizzled out into a draw from a Bishop and Pawn ending on the 73rd move. Strangely, both of them played out a quick draw in the second encounter, from an English Opening game in just 24 moves on Bakre’s offer. In a classic case of frayed nerves, both expressed that they stood not very sound in the final position when draw was agreed!

Bakre and Rathnakaran further played out two more matches towards tiebreak finally Tejas triumphed in the second tie-break match game when he accepted Rathnakaran’s piece sacrifice and won the game with a Kingside attack.

Venkatesh with Black pieces surprised the top seed Ganguly with the sharp Marshall Attack in the first encounter. Ganguly preferred a tactical skirmish without Queens, where he conceded the Bishop pair advantage for an extra Pawn. The game entered a complicated Rook and minor pieces endgame which was better for Ganguly he misplayed the ending to draw the game in 74 moves. Venkatesh once again surprised Ganguly in his Opening choice in the reverse encounter, preferring the solid Kings Indian Attack with White pieces. Ganguly equalized comfortably and it looked like he was about to turn the tide when Venkatesh came up with a brilliant Queen sacrifice on the 27th move, creating a dangerous passer on b7. Ganguly managed to find a way to get back both the pieces with a delightful calculation of variations, but at the cost of White’s Pawn queening. In the resultant Queen ending, Venkatesh weakened his Kingside enough to allow his King to be brought under continuous checks by the Black Queen and the game ended with perpetual check on the 63rd move.

In the 1st Tiebreak game, Ganguly uncorked his pet Richter Rauzer attack and caught Black’s King in the centre. He sacrificed a Pawn on f5 and got it back after a couple of moves. Venkatesh resigned on the 27th move when White’s forces were about to crash through the e-file and his King was about to be caught in a mating net. The second game turned out to be a comfortable affair for Ganguly as he built up a solid position from the Black side of a Ruy Lopez and defended White’s Kingside attack and repeated the moves in a better position to romp home.



Results :-

Pairings :-

Dark day for the white pieces
Written by content team on 02.11.2006
Most of the times its advantageous to play with white pieces however in round 3 of the Poona club knockout rapid chess championships, all the decisive wins of the match were scored by Black pieces.
  The dreaded Armageddon Tie-break appeared in the top board of the tournament involving GM Surya Sekhar Ganguly of IOC and IM Lanka Ravi of ONGC, thus providing an exciting time for the spectators and the Internet audience, in the 3rd Round.
Ravi started briskly, defeating the top seeded Ganguly in the very first game of their match, though, Ganguly fought back and won the second game. Ravi once again brought the younger Ganguly under pressure by winning the first game of their 10 Minute Blitz game and Ganguly proved his mettle by once again winning back under pressure to force the 5 minute tie break. However, though he checkmated Ganguly in the first game, Lanka tragically lost on time in the reverse game to go into the Armageddon finish. Finally, in a tense final game, Ganguly survived many scares to checkmate Lanka and enter into the Quarterfinals.

If the experienced Lanka stole the show on the Top Board, a similar performance came from Delhi lass Tania Sachdev who defeated veteran Grandmaster Pravin Thipsay of Union Bank once each in the Rapid game and the 10 minute Blitz game to force their match into 5 minute Tiebreaks. However, Thipsay

Rathanakaran of Southern Railway is the lowest seed of the field which didn’t matter the least for the Kerala lad, who had one of the best performances of his career by defeating GM Deepan Chakaravarthy of IOC in the 10 Minute tiebreak game and thus entered the quarter finals where he will face Bakre.

Grandmasters Dibyendu Barua, Tejas Bakre and RB Ramesh brushed aside the challenges of their younger opponents in their Rapid Game matches, whereas Abhijit Kunte had to defeat the young Gopal in the 10 Minute Tie-break games.

In the lone battle of the day between International Masters, M.R.Venkatesh outwitted his Bharat Petroleum colleague V.Saravanan in the 10 minute Blitz match 1.5 – 0.5 to reach the 4th round. Curiously, all the decisive wins of the match were scored by Black pieces.

3rd Round Results:

GM SS Ganguly                                   beat      IM Lanka Ravi (1 – 1, 1 – 1, 1 – 1, 1 – 0)

IM MR Venkatesh                               beat      IM V.Saravanan (1 – 1, 1.5 – 0.5)

GM RB Ramesh                                   beat      IM S.Kidambi  (1.5 – 0.5)

GM PM Thipsay                                  beat      WGM Tania Sachdev   (1 – 1, 1 – 1, 2 – 0)

K.Rathnakaran                                     beat      GM Deepan Chakravarthy (1 – 1, 1.5 – 0.5)

GM Tejas Bakre                                  beat      IM Abhijeet Gupta (2 – 0)

Exciting and tense battles in round 2
Written by content team on 31.10.2006
  Grandmasters RB Ramesh and Deepan Chakravarthy (both Indian Oil) stormed into the 3rd round of the Poona Knockout Rapid Chess Tournament held at the Poona Club here at Pune. In the second round saw both of them outwit their opponents IM Anup Deshmukh and Arjun Tiwari with a clean 2 – 0 on the scoreboard respectively. Joining the youngsters were GM Pravin Thipsay who outwitted former National Women Champion and WGM Nisha Mohota to continue his solid run in the event. Sudhakar Babu with White pieces gifted the top seeded Ganguly a full Rook in the first game, which was enough for Ganguly who withstood some pressure in the Second Round to ultimately win the match 1.5 – 0.5.

  But Grandmasters Abhijit Kunte, Dibyendu Barua and Tejas Bakre were all held by their lower rated opponents in Rapid games, to take the match into the Blitz tie-breaks in the Second Round of the thus to keep the excitement alive. Barua ultimately won 2.5 – 1.5 against youngster M.Shyam Sundar of Chennai who put up a creditable show, while Kunte blanked Eesha in both the Blitz Tie-break games to make the score 3 – 1. However, after the game, a smiling Kunte admitted that he was a little worse at some point in almost all the 4 games!

  The energy and fighting spirit of the youth produced exciting and tense battles in the Second Round, as the match-ups Tania Sachdev vs. Karthikeyan, Saptarshi Roy – GN Gopal and IMs Prathamesh Mokal vs. Abhijeet Gupta all went into the tie-break Blitz games of 10 minutes each. A large number of spectators turned up to watch the action in the playing hall as well as at the Display Centre which had large sized screen projections and Computer monitors to provide all the excitement for the interested. Ultimately, the higher rated Tania and Abhijeet triumphed with scores of 2.5 – 1.5 and 3 – 1 respectively.

  It was the turn of Saptarshi – GN Gopal to enter into the Armageddon finish, after all their regular matches ended in a tie at 3 – 3. Thus the final 6 vs 5 minutes, finish where White gets the extra minute but is forced to win the game to triumph. In the tense final game, Gopal called the toss correctly, preferred to defend with Black, and won the game anyway to score a 4 – 3 victory.

  The enigmatic B.Shivananda continued his long fights for the second successive day. After prevailing over WGM Aarthie Ramaswamy in a marathon 6 game match yesterday, he put up quite a fight again but Tejas finally triumphed in both the 5 minutes Blitz games to ultimately win the match 4 – 2.

  IMs Lanka Ravi and V.Saravanan, and the young IM – elect Akshayraj Kore all made short work of their opponents with a clean 2 – 0 scores to progress into the Third Round, while IM M.R.Venkatesh dropped half a point to Vikaramaditya Kamble before prevailing over him in the second game.

  After accounting for Soumya Swaminathan yesterday, K.Rathanakaran of Southern Railway continued being effective against the fairer sex by outwitting IWM Kruttika Nadig of Pune with an effective 1.5 – 0.5 margin.

Round 2 results :-

Pairings of the round 3 :-

Barua, Ramesh Stretched at Poona Club Knockout Rapid Chess Tournament
Written by content team on 30.10.2006
Grand Masters Dibeyendu Barua , RB ramesh went through a harrowing time before overcoming their opponents via tiebreakers, while wild card entrant youngster Krutikka nadig of Banglore scored the biggest upset of the day accounting for Woman Grand Master Swati Ghate to enter the second round of the Poona Club Knockout International Rapid Chess Championships being Conducted by Buddhibal Kreeda Trust and Poona Club in association with Chess Players Association of India in Pune.
  In the First Round of the Poona Knockout Rapid Chess Tournament held at the Poona Club here at Pune, started off to a brisk start here, the results mostly on expected lines but with a fair share of excitement. The day definitely belonged to youngsters Abhishek Kelkar and Chinmay Kulkarni, who nearly shocked their fancied opponents by winning a game each, thus extending the matches into tie-breaks.
   While local lad Kelkar put out GM Dibyendu Barua in the first game, Kelkar beat GM Ramesh in their second game, thus both the matches going into tiebreaks. However, the tiebreak games with 10 Minutes each were comfortably won 2-0 by both Barua and Ramesh, thus finishing off the matches with 3 – 1 scores.
  Otherwise, ultimate trend of the matches went on expected lines in the First Round. While the top seed GM Surya Sekhar Ganguly comfortably scored a perfect 2 – 0 checkmating his opponent in both the games under 20 moves, similar results also came from his GM colleagues Tejas Bakre and Pravin Thipsay. There was lot of interest on Thipsay, the seasoned GM playing competitive Chess after a break of more than 6 months, and in faster time control after a whopping 13 years! Though admitting his obvious rustiness, Thipsay nevertheless scored comfortably with both colours to advance to the next round.
  In a battle of the fair-sexes, WIM Kruttika Nadig upset WGM Swathi Ghate with a score of 1.5 – 0.5, while WGM Tania Sachdev advanced to the second round outwitting Naveen Jain with the same score. Seasoned campaigners Sharad Tilak, V.Saravanan and Lanka Ravi and young guns MR Venkatesh, Prathamesh Mokal, Akshayraj Kore and V.Kamble all advanced to the second round with comfortable wins.
  Apart from the Rapid Time Control (about 1 hour for the whole game), another interesting feature of the day was the introduction of E-Scoresheets for the first time ever in India. In Chess, after making every move, players register their moves on a paper scoresheet, thus recording the whole game.
  The Monroi System , an invention in Chess for the past year or so, has introduced a hand-held device called Personal Chess Manager (in the shape and dimension of a Calculator), with touch screen technology. On the LCD Screen, players get to see a Chess Board with pieces, which can be operated with a stylus, a pencil like pointing device. So, instead of writing down the moves, players get to move around the pieces on an LCD screen thus inputting the moves.
  Apart from the obvious advantage of the input of the moves being faster, this also make sure that the moves get directly transmitted over to the Wireless Networking done by city basedCache Technologies , thus the games getting transmitted Live on the Internet. The Website of the Chess Players Association of India thus hosts the Live games of the event. Thus, the excitement of the novel scoring system took most of the attention of the spectators and players, and the story of the actual games too added up to the story.
  The spoilers of the day were definitely Saurabh Kherdekar and WGM Eesha Karavade, who played out a marathon First match game lasting about 80 moves and more than 100 minutes. Kherdekar had an advantage of a Queen and Pawn against Queen in a long ending, and tried to trick his higher rated opponent for most part of the Ending, but Eesha could hold forte with careful defence. Just when it occurred that the game was ending in a draw, Eesha suddenly took a long think and tragically overstepped the time limit, thus losing the game.
   This also made sure that, though the other games had ended, the next round could not start but overstepped its stipulated schedule by more than an hour. However, Eesha put it across Kherdekar to tie the match, and the first set of tiebreaks (10 Min each) again failed to break the deadlock and the match went into a further reduced 5 minutes each games, when Eesha finally triumphed after a marathon 6 games, making it the longest match of the day.

Following are the Results: (1^st Round)

GM SS Ganguly           bt                     MS Din (2 – 0)

IM Lanka Ravi             bt                     Sohan Phadke (1.5 – 0.5)

Gopal Rathod               Lost to             IM Venkatachalam Saravanan (0.5 – 1.5)

Vikramaditya Kamble   Beat                 Prasanjit Dutta (2 – 0)

Harish Sharma              Lost to             IM MR Venkatesh (1 – 1, 0 – 2)

GM RB Ramesh           Beat                 Chinmay Kulkarni (1 – 1, 2 – 0)

IM Sharad Tilak           Beat                 Purushothaman (1.5 – 0.5)

Naveen Jain                  Lost to             WGM Tania Sachdev (0.5 – 1.5)

WGM Swathi Ghate     Lost to             IWM Kruttika Nadig ( 0.5 – 1.5)

GM Tejas Bakre          Beat                 Amruta Mokal (1.5 – 0.5)

IM Prathamesh Mokal  Beat                 OT Anil Kumar ( 1.5 – 0.5)

Akshay Raj Kore         Beat                 Chaitanya Vaidya (1.5 – 0.5)

Abhishek Kelkar          Lost to             GM Dibyendu Barua (1 – 1, 0 - 2)

WGM Eesha Karavade Beat                Saurabh Kherdekar (1 – 1, 1- 1, 2 – 0)

Megan Gupte               Lost to             GM PM Thipsay (0 – 2)

School boy P. Karthikeyan wins the Chennai blitz chess tournament.

Young P.Karthikeyan of Velammal Matriculation Higher Secondary School  emerged winner of the Chess Players Association of India's Blitz Chess Tournament, held at the Red Cross Society, Egmore, Chennai. Event was sponsored by the Poona Club and ONGC with contribution from the Indian Oil. P.Karthikeyan, IM N.Sudhakar Babu and M.Shyam Sundar booked their seats for the Pune knockout tournament.
Reported by Mr. V. Sarvanan on 25.10.2006

The event attracted a total of 81 participants, among them an impressive 5 International Masters and 28 Internationally Rated players. A total of Rs.10,000/- in Cash Prizes were distributed, which included Age Category prizes.

The event also featured a lecture demonstration by Grandmaster R.B.Ramesh, who had an interactive session with the players, coaches and parents.

The reigning Tamilnadu Blitz Champion Karthikeyan accounted for IM Poobesh Anand in the final round to become the sole winner on 8 points from 9 games, having defeated IMs M.R.Venkatesh and T.S.Ravi earlier in the event.

IM Sudhakar Babu of Indian Bank finished the sole Runner-up on 7.5 points after a fighting win over IM M.R.Venkatesh in the final round. The Third place went to another youngster M.Shyam Sundar of SDCVV School, who was the only player to defeat the tournament winner.

Prize Winners:

1. Karthikeyan 8 points
2. Sudhakar Babu 7.5
3 – 6: Shyam Sundar, Poobesh Anand, G.Akash and R.Arun Karthik 7 each
7 – 10: R.Ashwath, C.Praveen Kumar, N.Vignesh and D.S.Shashank 6.5 each
11 – 17: T.J.Suresh Kumar, Syed Anwar Shazuli, M.R.Venkatesh, Venkat Sundaram, P.Lokesh, P.Phoobalan and Shivashankar.

Best U-12: D.S.Shashank
Best U-16: Arun Karthik
Best U-20: Venkat Sundaram
Best Woman: Bala Kannamma
 

Panditrao booked his seat for Knockout tournament

In the 3rd Poona Club Blitz Chess Championship organised by Buddhibal Kreeda Trust, Top Seed Grand Master Tejas Bakre of Indian Airlines won the 3rd leg of the Poona Club Blitz Chess Challenge held on 8th October 2006 at Pune. He won with a score of 8/9 tying with Kiran Panditrao for 1st place but winning the title on a better progressive score. [ Read more ]
Written by Content Team on 10.10.2006

Tejas beat Vikrant Chole, Soumitra Mujumdar, Amardeep Bartakke, Kiran Panditrao and IM C.S. Gokhale en route to the title, his only loss coming at the hands of International Master Prathamesh Mokal of Pune. Since Bakre being a Grandmaster is already seeded for the Mega Rapid-Knockout event the qualifying slot from this leg went to 2nd placed Kiran Panditrao. The last round witnessed some excitement as 4 players namely Bartakke, Mokal, Bakre and Panditrao (in this order according to progressive tie break) were tied at 7 points each. While Mokal frittered away a win against Panditrao to lose on time, Bartakke too used up his time and lost to Soumitra Muzumdar. Lady luck smiled on Tejas Bakre and while his main rivals lost their games he beat C.S.Gokhale to become champion.
  We say chess is getting younger and younger and comparatively blitz chess should suit the young blood even more, but Kiran Panditrao, at 41 proved everyone wrong by tying for 1st place in the presence of one Grandmaster, one Woman Grandmaster and 3 International Masters. WGM Swati Ghate and International Master Akshayraj Kore had a forgettable tournament. Pune’s 4th and last leg of the blitz Grand prix will be held on 29th October.
Prize List (Rank Name Points & Progressive score)

1st : GM. Tejas Bakre 8, 40
2nd: Kiran Panditrao 8, 39
3rd Amardeep Bartakke 7, 42
4th I.M. Prathmesh Mokal 7, 40
5th Saumitra Mujumdar 7, 39
6th Vikramaditya kamble 7, 38
7th Sohan Phadke 7, 36
8th Sumukh Gaikwad 7, 35
9th Anirudha Deshpande 6.5, 34
10th Vikrant Chole 6.5, 31.5
11th I.M. Akshayraj Kore 6, 35
12th Gopal Rathod 6, 34
13th I.M. C.S. Gokhale 6, 34
14th Ketan Khaire 6, 33
15th Vikas Sharma 6, 32