Mozharov stays ahead; IM norms for four Indians

Grandmaster Mikhail Mozharov of Russia stayed ahead with a hard fought draw with compatriot Ivan Popov in the ninth and penultimate round of 13th Parsvnath International Grandmasters chess tournament here today.
C R G Krishna, Aniruddha Deshpande, Abhishek Kelkar and Ravi Teja continued with their fine run in the tournament and secured their International Master norms with one round to spare. The other norm hopefuls will have to wait for the final round.
Mozharov played a nearly crazy game before he could force a draw with Popov. Although room-mates and friends, the two Russians came up with some exemplary chess that kept the audience on the web guessing for a long time.

Popov sacrificed as many as three pawns in the opening but eventually took the draw after Mozharov steered his king to safety.
It turned out to be a bad outing for GM norm seekers as both N Srinath and S Nitin ended on the losing side against Grandmaster opposition. It was heartbreak for Srinath after doing exceptionally well in the tournament as he was grinded by Alberto David of Italy in a long drawn game while Nitin never found the going easy against Duc Hoa Nguyen of Vietnam.
With just one round to come, Mozharov on 7.5 points is now followed by as many as five players on seven points each. They are Popov, Van Huy Nguyen of Vietnam, Andrey Baryshpolets of Ukraine, David and Deepan Chakkravarthy. These five are followed by another pack of 11 players on 6.5 points each.

The miss-of-the-day came from Deepan Chakkravarthy who let go of a winning position and had to settle for a draw with Anton Demchenko of Russia. After nearly outplaying Demchenko in the middle game and attaining what could be described as a completely won position, Chakkravarthy missed the thread and eventually had to split the point in the ensuing rook and pawns endgame.
Among other Indians in the fray the two top rated Indians had to go through long grinds. Abhijeet Gupta was stretched a lot by Diego Del Rey before he could score a victory while Sahaj Grover played out a draw with S Satyapragyan.