Mixed Day For Indians

By Arvind Aaron

The opening day of the World Chess Championship for women saw mixed fortunes for the three Indian girls. While the top seed Koneru Humpy won against the bottom seed Van der Merwe with the black pieces, her Andhra team-mate Dronavalli Harika went down with the black pieces to Viktoria Cmilyte (wife of Alexei Shirov). Meenakshi Subbaraman of Chennai managed a draw with the black pieces against the higher rated Iweta Radziewicz of Poland.

Chinese powerhouse of reigning world champion, Zhu Chen and former champion Xie Jun are non-starters. Georgia is fully represented. The event takes place at the Chess City, more famous for being the venue of the 1998 Elista Chess Olympiad in Russia. Humpy won the toss and chose to play black for her opening game. Thus, all the odd seeded players received black and even seeds received white. Meenakshi and Harika also got black.

It all happened for the Indians. Humpy was first winning and then lost two rooks for a queen. She was expected to be back to the wall against an opponent rated some 500 Elo points below. The South African opponent misplayed the ending where a minimum draw was at hand. Humpy scored her first full point and what a lucky one!

Meenakshi equalised in a sharp Grunfeld game where they fought until the very end of their 68-move draw. Harika had comfortable equality and had to wait. Harika missed a promising opportunity on the 49th turn when she could have drawn or won a rook ending instead of having lost it against higher rated Viktoria Cmilyte (Ltu). In their reverse games, Meenakshi has white and could use that to advance while Harika plays white and can hit back and force the tie-break.

The event is a 64-player knock out best-of-two contest. In the previous event held at Moscow's prestigious Kremlim, Zhu Chen beat Alexandra Kosteniuk of Russia for the title in December 2001.

Nadezhda Kosintseva of Russia and Wang Pin of China were the lone higher seeds to lose round one, game one. They can be expected to make comebacks. World Cup 2000 finalists, Xu Yuhua and Natalia Zhukova were held to draws. So were Almira Skripchenko and a few others. Sunday will decide who moves up and who packs bags.

Download all games and see results in TWIC

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