Calcutta: The top four seeds, along with 34 others, were in the lead with three points each, at the end of the third round of The Telegraph Schools' Fide-Rated Chess tournament, organised by Alekhine Chess Club at Gorky Sadan, here on Saturday.

Local lad Diptayan Ghosh, the star attraction of the meet, stayed well on track to defend the title with a win over Anghira Choudhury of GD Birla School. Diptayan is from South Point HS and is a product of Alekhine Chess Club.

He played the Catalan system with white, in the Queens Gambit Declined game by his opponent Anghira. Attacking the king side, Diptayan ripped open Anghira's king side. After exchanging the queens on the 19th move, he gained a pawn in the middle game. He maintained the superior position and converted the knight Vs bishop, resulting in an easy win in 69 moves.

A Ra Harikrishnan of Sethu Baskara MHSS, Chennai, adopted the advanced variation of French defence against Tuhin Saha of South Point.

He sacrificed his knight on the 17th move, but gained compensation in the form of severe attack on the queen side. Harikrishnan, an IM norm holder, needed only 28 moves to force his opponent to surrender.

Pudasaini Biraj of Nepal accepted the Queens Gambit by third seed Mitrabha Guha, another product of South Point. Both castled as early as on the sixth move, and Mitrabha capitalised on the few mistakes by Pudasaini in the opening to obtain a clear advantage. On the 46th move, Guha checkmated his opponent with his queen and bishop.

Fourth seed Rajdeep Sarkar of Bhavans GKV employed the Smyslov system against the Ruy Lopez game played by his opponent Sourath Biswas of Sri Aurobindo Institute of Education. After exchanging the queens on 22nd move, Rajdeep needed only one more move to crush his opponent and cruise to a win.

TOP BOARD RESULTS

Round III

Diptayan Ghosh (3) bt Angira Choudhuri (2); A Ra Harikrishnan (3) bt Tuhin Saha (2); Mitrabha Guha (3) bt Pudasaini Biraj (2); Rajdeep Sarkar (3) bt Sourath Biswas (2); Kaustuv Kundu (3) bt Basant Kr. Das (2); Arpita Mukherjee (3) bt Ayushman Majumdar (2); Neelash Saha (3) bt Lama Prajim (2); Md F Rahman (Bangladesh, 3) bt Sonowal Aryan (2); Aronyak Ghosh(3) bt Soumyajit Das (2); Aditya Basu(3) bt Subhadip Seth (2).