Candidates: Praggnanandhaa takes Giri in his stride as Divya, Vaishali start with a draw

NAGPUR: Playing at an accuracy level of as high as 99% for almost five hours, gave Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu a winning start in his second Candidates appearance. In the opening round, Pragg placed his pawns and pieces with perfection to prevail over experienced Dutch GM Anish Giri in Cyprus on Sunday.In the 5-hour, 20-minute contest, Pragg picked the Grand Prix variation of the Closed Sicilian defence, utilized the two minor errors from Giri to open his Candidates campaign with a perfect score.The 51-move contest saw the 2741 Elo Pragg eventually playing at an accuracy level of 97.3%, making most of an extra pawn to force higher-ranked Giri to resign. On the 29th turn, when Pragg placed his rook in the attacking line and brought his bishop to guard his king, Viswanathan Anand termed that move “genius” while analysing the game, and from that position the world No.13 strengthened his grip on the game.Earlier, on their Candidates debut, the 20-year-old World Cup winners Divya Deshmukh and Javokhir Sindarov of Uzbekistan delivered impressive results. While Sindarov survived a wild mutual time scramble to outplay Russia’s Andrey Esipenko in 41 moves, Divya started her campaign with a draw.The 2497 Elo Divya held Ukraine’s most experienced and higher-ranked Anna Muzychuk to a 35-move draw. With an eye to avenge her Grand Prix defeat in Cyprus last year, Divya chose the Scotch opening and had the upper hand on the clock.A 20th-move attacking move, which eventually became the only error by Divya, gave 2522 Elo Muzychuk a chance to bring parity. By the 26th move, Muzychuk and Divya came almost at par on time, and Anand felt the Indian girl was in danger. Divya, however, took nine minutes to advance her rook with an excellent 27th move to take the safest route. When Divya realized that the advantage of winning was lost, she took no time to split the points by repetition.After the game, Muzychuk said, “I am satisfied with the result because I didn’t have chances for more and it could be worse.”The lowest-ranked participant of the Candidates, Vaishali Rameshbabu, survived huge time trouble and a difficult position to hold reigning three-time women's world blitz champion and Kazakhstan talented GM Bibisara Assaubayeva.Utilizing Bibisara’s 29th-move mistake, Vaishali bailed herself out to split the points in 40 moves. The battle between the top two Chinese players, Zhu Jiner and Tan Zhongyi, remained equal and ended in a draw after 41 moves.The contest of two Russian women, Aleksandra Goryachkina and Kateryna Lagno, was a marathon 73-move battle that ended in a draw. After Goryachkina made a mid-game blunder, Lagno levelled. The first result of the opening round in the Candidates came when Germany’s Matthias Bluebaum failed to take advantage of the clock to play out a 26-move draw with China’s 2754 Elo Wei Yi. Though the 28-year-old Bluebaum was going well on the clock with 30 extra minutes, higher-ranked Chinese Wei offered his rook to end the game in a draw by perpetual check.