Divya Deshmukh — the lone woman in the 206-player field — and home-state GM Leon Mendonca have been knocked out of the World Cup chess in the second game of their first round match at Rio Resort in Goa on Sunday.
Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Divya could not repeat her Women’s World Cup fourth-round feat of coming from behind, after losing the first game with white pieces against higher-rated GM Stamatis Kourkoulos-Arditis of Greece (2583).
China’s B Shixu Wang, playing with white pieces, outplayed Mendonca in 57 moves after the players had drawn the previous day. His compatriots — starting with Xie Jun in a 100-player field in 2000 and ending with Hou Yifan and Ju Wenjun this year — had qualified for the Open World Cup on merit but opted out. Divya took the wild card bait and battled for 73 moves over a span of five and a half hours.
Neelash Saha, Himal Gusain and Harshvardhan GB were the other Indians who crashed out. Diptayan Ghosh, SL Narayanan, Aronyak Ghosh, Lalit Babu and Raja Rithvik stretched their games to tiebreaks of shorter time control slated for Monday. Diptayan and Narayanan could not finish in the classical phase.
Still, things are not that gloomy for the hosts as M Pranesh, P Iniyan, Surya Shekhar Ganguly, V Pranav, Raunak Sadhwani and Karthik Venkataraman advanced to the second round.
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