Pune: Grandmaster Sandipan Chanda took the Day 1 honours with a splendid victory over highly regarded GM Alexander Beliavsky of Slovenia in the first round of category-16 Super GMs chess tournament here on Friday.

Surprisingly enough, Sandipan was the lone Indian to score the full point as GM P. Harikrishna and national champion Surya Shekhar Ganguly threw away promising positions against Emil Sutovsky of Israel and Zurab Azmaiparashvili of Georgia, respectively. While Harikrishna could salvage the half point in the end, Ganguly’s blunder cost him dearly as he did not get any chance to redeem himself.

World champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov of Uzbekistan started on a positive note, defeating former British Open champion GM Abhijit Kunte in a finely crafted tactical game.

In the other game of the day, country’s best hope Krishnan Sasikiran took a draw without much ado against top seed Liviu-dieter Nisipeanu of Romania. The tournament is being played on a round-robin basis where each participant plays against every other player once. It was a day of reckoning for Sandipan who called his victory against Beliavsky the best in his career yet, rightly so as the Calcutta based ONGC employee was in top form even though Beliavsky acted tough in the major part of the game.

Leading chess players participating in the pune international chess festival wore black badges on Friday to protest against the ten per cent prize money cut effected by the AICF.

Four of the five Indian players playing in the catgeory-16 Super GMs tournament along with some others in the open tournament wore black badges making it the first such protest in a chess tournament in India. A section of the players including seven GMs had earlier lodged a plea with the AICF secretary P.T. Ummer Koya to withdraw the prize money cut as announced by the AICF after the last general body meeting.