Unheralded Sathish Chandra holds top-seed Predke to a draw

: India's G Sathish Chandra held top-seeded Russian Grand Master Alexandr Predke to a draw in the first round of the 11th Chennai Open International Grandmaster Chess tournament for Sakthi Group Dr N Mahalingam trophy, here Friday.

Satish Chandra matched the Super GM, with an Elo rating of 2620, move for move and hung on for a precious half a point after 77 moves.

The resultant position offered little for the Russian as he agreed for a draw with the Indian with a rating of 1665.

The rest of the seeds had it easy on the opening day of the tournament, which offers a total prize money of Rs 15 lakh.

A total of 286 entries from 15 countries including 20 Grand Masters and 65 titled players have been received for the tourney.

Results: 1st round (Indians unless specified): G Sathish Chandra drew with Alexandr Predke (Rus), Levon Pantsulaia (Geo) bt Adireddy Tarun, M S Dharani Kumar lost to Ivan Rozum (Rus), Ivan Popov (Rus) bt Adarsh Tripathi, Evrin Selvam lost to Luka Paichadze (Geo), Aleksej Aleksandro (Blr) bt G Aakash G.

B Badri Narayan lost to Erigaisi Arjun, Deepan Chakkravarthy bt Niharika Ch, T Divyan lost to Stupak Kirill (Blr), Tran Tuan Minh (Vie) bt Tejes Suresh Kumar, Giri Abhishek lost to Megaranto Susanto (Ina), Karthik Venkataraman bt Chirag Mudraje.