Bhakti, Padmini Start Well

By Arvind Aaron

Indian girls, seed 11 Padmini Rout of Orissa and seed 16 Bhakti Kulkarni of Goa are in joint second place with 3.5 points after four rounds in the World Junior Girls Championship being played at Chotowa-Czarna, in southern Poland. This event runs from August 3-16.

Bodda Pratyusha is on 1.5 points from four games. Nine rounds remain to be played in both sections. There are 81 players in the girls section of which only six are WGMs and one IM, and 13 WIMs, 22 WFMs.

The idea of organising the world junior was a brainchild of William Ritson-Morry of England who also organised the first such event in 1951 in England. The 49th World Junior champion will be crowned in Poland and the 50th edition will take place in Chennai during 2011. India had won this event three times in boys and three times in girls. Viswanathan Anand won it at Bagiuo 1987, Pentala Harikrishna won at Kochi 2004 and Abhijeet Gupta won in Gaziantep 2008. Koneru Humpy won this event in Athens 2001, Dronavalli Harika won in Gaziantep 2008 and Soumya Swaminathan won in 2009 at Puerto Madrin. If Padmini or Bhakti win it will be an Indian hat-trick.

After four rounds, two Indians, Grand Master Parimarjan Negi of Delhi and International Master M.R. Lalith Babu of Andhra are tied for the tenth place with three points. Further below on 2.5 points are Debashis Das of Cuttack, Swapnil Dhopade of Amravati, Anwesh Upadhyaya of Bhubaneswar on 2.5 points. National Junior champion S.P. Sethuraman,      R. Arun Karthik and Dharmendra Sagar are on two points. Two-time Asian junior champion Ashwin Jayaram is on one points. There are 120 players of which 19 are GMs and 35 are IMs and 20 FMs.

Photos by Mr.Lanka Ravi

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Home                                                      Published on Aug 07, 2010