Calcutta: Six players shared the lead with five points apiece at the end of Round V of the 25th The Telegraph Schools' Fide-rated Chess Championship, organised by Alekhine Chess Club and co-sponsored by Yamaha, at Gorky Sadan, on Sunday.
They are followed by eight players, all of whom are on 4.5 points. A mild upset was on the cards, but somehow the second-seeded A Ra Harikrishnan of Tamil Nadu played out a draw against Suvradeepta Das.
Top seed IM Diptayan Ghosh of South Point High School and his schoolmate Aditya Basu were engaged in a battle arising from the fianchetto variation of King's Indian defence, played by the latter. Aditya's opening moves were not as powerful as those of Diptayan, who consolidated his position gradually.
When Diptayan picked up a couple of his opponent's pawns in the middle game, the writing was on the wall. Aditya eventually gave up the fight after 42 moves.
Many of the top boards witnessed fierce and interesting battles. Mitrabha Guha played the exchange variation of Queen's Indian defence against Ritam Nag.
Mitrabha had a good position in the end game, with two knights in his kitty against the lone pawn to his opponent. Though a draw was on the prediction, Ritam made a blunder by moving his king to the corner and paid the penalty for it in the form of a checkmate by Mitrabha.
Harikrishnan was in a slightly inferior position in a game transposed to classical variation of French defence against Suvradeep who had an extra pawn in the rook and pawns end game. But Harikrishnan used his resources to extract half a point.
Though WFM Arpita Mukherjee had a king, queen and a pawn against Soumma Chakraborty's king, rook and two pawns, she could not break the fortress set by her opponent and had to settle for a draw.
Diptayan Ghosh (5) bt Aditya Basu (4); Suvradeepta Das (4.5) drew with A. Ra Harikrishnan (4.5); Mitrabha Guha (5) bt Ritam Nag (4); Srijit Paul (4) lost to Rajdeep Sarkar (5); Kaustuv Kundu (5) bt Rajarshi Dutta (4); Soumma Chakraborty (4.5) drew with Arpita Mukherjee (4.5); Samriddhaa Ghosh (5) bt Mohammed Fahad Rahman (4); Aronyak Ghosh (5) bt Sparsh Khandelwal (4); Anustoop Biswas (4.5) bt Arijit Mukherjee (4); Utsab Chatterjee (4) drew with Sarbojit Paul (4); Sudarshan Mitra (4.5) bt Sambarta Banerjee (3.5); Sayantan Das (4) bt Shubhang Saurabh (3); Subhayan Kundu (4.5) bt Aritra Sau (3.5); Soham Saha (3.5) lost to Aryan B Joshi (4.5); Neelash Saha (4) bt Atri Chattopadhyay 3; Shradha Kucheria (3) lost to Sonkalan Bharati (4); Saptorshi Gupta (4) bt Mongal Hembrom 3; Hiran Banerjee (3) lost to Ambarish Sharma (4); Ayantika Das (3) lost to Sayan Banik (4); Arya Bhakta (4) bt Bitan Chakraborty (3); Akshath Sinha (3) lost to Sayantan Chandra (4); Souhardo Basak (3.5) drew with Sanket Chakravarty (3.5); Rounak Pathak (4) bt Arka Dutta (3); Diya Chowdhury (3.5) drew with Rohan Sen (3.5)
