Harikrishna was brilliant against Jun

Tripoli: Krishnan Sasikiran suffered a shock defeat against Kritz Leonid of Germany in the first game of the opening round of the world chess championship on Saturday.

Barring a couple of big surprises, it was a day of smooth sailing for the stalwarts and top seed Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine and Englishmen Nigel Short and Michael Adams cruised to easy victories.

The Indians did not have a good day apart from P. Harikrishna who defeated Xu Jun of China in a remarkable game.

Neelotpal Das got a walkover as his opponent Vadim Milov of Switzerland failed to turn up.

National champion Surya Sekhar Ganguly and Dibyendu Barua succumbed to defeats against higher-rated GMs, Peter Heine Nielsen of Denmark and Alexander Graf of Germany.

In the biggest upset of the day, Viktor Bologan crashed to a surprising against defeat against Mark Paragua of the Philippines while Georgian Zurab Azmaiparashvili lost to Mahjoob Morteza of Iran.

The championship is being played in a knockout format. Each player plays twice against each opponent till the semi-finals.

The stakes are high with first-round losers taking home $6000 and $100,000 for the champion in a prize pool of a little over one-and-half million.

The turn-up hasn’t been great with four of the 128 qualifiers staying away. They are Alexander Morozevich of Russia, Americans Yuri Shulman, Sergey Kudrin and Milov of Switzerland.

The championship is also severely weakened due to the non-participation of top guns Viswanathan Anand, Alexei Shirov, Peter Svidler, Judit Polgar and Ruslan Ponomariov. They all refused to sign the player’s contracts. In fact, Topalov and Adams are the only players here from the top ten in the world.

Sasikiran was considered a sure bet for the second round but the defeat proved that the knockout system is full of surprises. The Indian is now under pressure to win the return game against to force the mini-match to the tie-break.

Harikrishna was brilliant against Jun who played a popular variation of the Nazdorf and thought he had equalised after the queens got traded early.

Harikrishna improved his position in the minor-pieces endgame wherein his bishop-knight combination eventually proved superior against double knights of his opponent. (PTI)