Divya fails to exploit Vaishali’s inaccuracy to miss opportunity for Candidates lead

NAGPUR: She found the best move with just four seconds remaining on the clock against compatriot R Vaishali. But Divya Deshmukh missed an idea of queen exchange in the second round of the Women’s Candidates chess tournament in Cyprus on Monday.

The all-India battle was the lone exciting game of the day after 12 of the 16 Candidates played largely safe and their six games in two sections ended in draws.




In the Open section, R Praggnanandhaa had control over his clock and also had an extra pawn. But playing with black pieces, 20-year-old Indian co-leader fell short on material to sign a peace treaty with higher-ranked Chinese GM Wei Yi. The game lasted 46 moves.

While all the four games in the women’s section were drawn for the second consecutive day, there was some drama in the Divya-Vaishali clash. Divya missed Qg4 on the 37th turn which would have made Vaishali rue her 34th knight-move that had tilted the computer evaluation from 0.15 to 2.47 in Divya’s favour. It was not clearly winning but it would have troubled Vaishali a lot.

When Vaishali made a potentially game changing 34th move, it was advantage Divya, and the latter chose the perfect move (Rxb7) with just four seconds remaining on her clock. On the 37th turn, Divya made a mistake when she overlooked a queen-exchanging move, and Vaishali equalised. Four moves later, the Indian GMs split a point.

Divya said, “I had seen Vaishali's queen exchange in advance (40...Qxh3!), but simply missed the winning alternative.”

A few moves later, the deadlock was reached in rook and five pawns each endgame in which Vaishali’s rook on a1 controlled Divya’s passed pawn.

A couple of Petrov's Defence games was the order of the day in earlier games.

In a repeat of their 2017 World Championship match, former women’s champion Tan Zhongyi of China chose Petrov's Defence to play out a 32-move draw with Ukraine’s higher-ranked GM Anna Muzychuk.

In the open section, reigning World Cup winner Javokhir Sindarov failed to utilise his opening advantage with the white pieces after lower-ranked Matthias Bluebaum chose Petrov and went for three-fold rook repetition in the endgame to force a draw after 42 moves.
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