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The National `A' Championships for men and women will be held together from April 2 at Visakhapatnam. It will be organised by the All Vizag District Chess Association on behalf of the All India Chess Federation. This will be the most important event for the calendar year since it will select the Indian team for the fast approching Chess Olympiad to be held at Turin in Italy from May 20.
Besides the Chess Olympiad, the team to represent India in various other events will be selected from this event. Both the defending champions, GM Surya S Ganguly of Indian Oil, Kolkata and WGM Nisha Mohota of
PSPB, Kolkata will be in the fray in their respective sections. Ganguly had retained his title in the previous edition at Visakhapatnam in December 2004 and Mohota had won her maiden women's title at Bangalore in May 2005.
The prize fund for the men event will be Rs.2.65 lakhs, up by 10% from the previous event which was also held at Visakhapatnam. The women's event will have a prize fund of Rs.1.25 lakhs according to K.V.V.Sarma, Secretary of the Vizag District Chess Association. This is the first time Vizag will be hosting the National Women's `A' Championship. They had organised the National Women's `B' in 1990.
Both the tournaments will be a 22-player round robin and will offer participants grandmaster and woman grandmaster norm possibilities. Grand Master Koneru Humpy who is seeded to both will have to opt to play in one event only. The men and women events were held together at Chennai 1995 and also in New Delhi in June 2001.
The names of the 22 qualified players in the men and women nationals is also released. Here is the list:
Men: R.B.Ramesh, Vikramaditya Kamble, Diwakar Prasad Singh, B.S.Shivanandan, P.D.S.Girinath, M.S.Thejkumar, Himanshu Kumar, Lanka Ravi, Sriram Jha, J.Deepan Chakkaravarthy, S.Arun Prasad, Arghyadip Das, Abhijeet Gupta, D.K.Sharma, Surya Shekar Ganguly, Sandipan Chanda, Abhijit Kunte, Sundararajan Kidambi, M.R.Venkatesh, Koneru Humpy, Saptarshi Roy Chowdhury, Tejas
Bakre.
Women: Nisha Mohota, Swati Ghate, Aarthie Ramaswamy, Tania Sachdev, Dronavalli Harika, Eesha Karavade, S.Meenakshi, S.Vijayalakshmi, Mary Ann Gomes, Anupama Gokhale, Bhagyashree Thipsay, Nimmy A.George, Supriya Maji, Soumya Swaminathan, Alka Das, I.Ramya Krishna, J.E.Kavitha, H.Soumya, Amruta Mokal, Swati Mohota, L.Iswarya Shobana, Kiran Mohanty.
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