Seeded players, including top seed IM Vikramaditya Kulkarni, easily won their respective opening-round matches in the Rs 1.50-lakh prize-money SBI Life All-Maharashtra FIDE Rating Chess Tournament, which commenced at the Don Bosco High School, Borivali, here today.
IM Kulkarni (ELO 2303) of Railways outwitted Ananya Vora (1041) from Mumbai in the white side of Queen's Gambit opening.
On the second board, Srinath Rao from Pune made short work of Mumbai's Hanel Kamdar in just 24 moves from the black side of French Defense, while former National 'B' champion, FM Avinash Awate (ELO 2135), had no difficulty in securing a full point against Jinay Mehta (ELO 1023).
This 10-round tournament has attracted a total of 314 players from Maharashtra, including 165 FIDE rated players.
Key results (Round 1): Vikramaditya Kulkarni 1 bt Ananya Vora 0, Hanel Kamdar 0 lost to Srinath Rao 1, Avinash Awate 1 bt Jinay Mehta 0, Tapan Joshi 0 lost to A Bartakke 1, Ketan Boricha 1 bt Om Sarode 0, M N Abhyankar 1 bt Gaurav Mehta 0, Shravani Patil 0 lost to S Kumthekar 1, Rajababu Gajengi 1 bt Devdutt Patel 0.
A Bhattacharya 0 lost to V Panesar 1, Pratik Shenvi 1 bt A Dengla 0, Aditi Yogesh Kayal 0 lost to Ketan Patil 1, Sayali Ambre 0 lost to Abhijit Joglekar 1, N Kadam 1 bt Arjun Jadhav 0, Advay Arora 0 lost to Rajesh Gupta 0, K Khandelwal 1 bt Vidya Balaji 0, Chinmay Barje 0 lost to A Polakhare 1, A Bandekar 1 bt Bavishi Krish 0.
