Grandmasters Pendyala Harikrishna, Sandipan Chanda and Surya Shekhar Ganguly scored fine victories and continued to lead the table with identical scores of 16.5 points at the end of the 22nd and penultimate round in the 41st National 'A' Chess Championship in Kozikhode on Friday.
Following the three leaders is British champion, Grandmaster Abhijit Kunte of PSPB on 14.5 points while Grandmasters Dibyendu Barua of West Bengal and Koneru Humpy are joint fifth with 14 points each.
Next in the standings is double Grandmaster norm holder Tejas Bakre of Indian Airlines, who is half a point adrift of Neelotpal Das of PSPB.
The stage is now set for a nail-biting finale in the last round with all the three leaders pitted against players without any chances in the event.
Chanda has the toughest customer of the lot in IM Sriram Jha of LIC; Ganguly will have to battle it out against Suvrajit Saha of West Bengal while Harikrishna faces IM S Satyaprgyan of India Airlines.
All the three leaders will play with black and it could be anybody's title. Of the three, Chanda has never been a part of the Indian senior team, while Ganguly and Hari have never been close to winning the title here though they have both been regulars in the team for past the few years.
Sandipan Chanda of PSPB was the star performer of this round after he defeated Humpy. In a bid to keep his maiden National title hopes alive, Sandipan was quite clinical in his approach and cashed in on minor positional errors by Humpy to turn the tide decisively in his favour.
Earlier, as black, Humpy opened with the Petroff defence and surprisingly opted for a passive variation that only gave her an inferior position. A timely queen exchange paved the way for Sandipan to exert pressure in the center and Humpy lost a pawn without any compensation. The game lasted 40 moves.
For Harikrishna this was the sixth victory on the trot and he will be sincerely hoping for one more in the final round game on Saturday. As things stand now, Hari's tiebreak score appears to be better but things might change in the final round. In today's game Hari made mince meat of Roktim Bandhopadhyay of West Bengal, who appeared at sea as the complexities ensued from an Old Indian defence game where the former played white.
Winning a pawn in the middle game itself, Hari quickly exchanged the pieces to reach a winning endgame where he was pleasantly surprised by Bandhopadhyay's premature resignation on move 27.
Ganguly, who was in sole lead for the major part of the tournament, accounted for his Kolkata citymate Arghyadip Das, who played black. It was a Sicilian Richter Rauzer attack where Ganguly masterminded a tactical finesse and sacrificed a piece on the 22nd turn. Just five moves later Das threw in the towel.
Barua converted a difficult position against Sriram Jha while Neelotpal Das defeated M R Venkatesh after the latter turned down a peace proposal.
Results (round 22): P Harikrishna (16.5) beat Roktim Bandhopadhyay (10); Abhijit Kunte (14.5) drew Prathamesh Mokal (10.5); Dibyendu Barua (14) beat Sriram Jha (8); Sadipan Chanda (6.5) beat Koneru Humpy (14); S Vikramjit Singh (9) drew V Hariharan (4.5); S Kidambi (12.5) beat Suvrajit Saha (8.5); S S Ganguly (16.5) beat Arghyadip Das (8); R B Ramesh (12.5) drew Praveen Thipsay (11); Vishal Sareen (8) drew Tejas Bakre (13. 5); M R Venkatesh (11) lost to Neelotpal Das (13); M Srinivasa Rao (4) drew Saptarshi Roy Chowdhury (11.5); T S Ravi (7.5) lost to S Satyapragyan (9).
