Harikrishna upset

KOZHIKODE, January 25: Unheralded Lakshminarayanan of Kerala kept his clean slate with a shocking third round win over National sub-junior c...

KOZHIKODE, January 25: Unheralded Lakshminarayanan of Kerala kept his clean slate with a shocking third round win over National sub-junior champion P Harikrishna of Andhra Pradesh in the National Junior Chess Championship at the indoor stadium here today.

In the National girls competition, second seed Nisha Mohota of West Bengal crashed to an uncharacteristic defeat against Ananya Sarkar of Goodricke Academy, Calcutta.

Lakshminarayanan, on three points, stayed in lead with top seed K Sasikiran, MR Venkatesh (both TN) and Manthan Chokshi (Gujarat).

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Harikrishna went for an unsound course in his favourite English Opening and gave the advantage to Lakshminarayanan on move 19.

The Kerala junior champion won two pieces for his rook and slowly tightened the screws. In the end, Harikrishna had to part with a full rook after 60 moves.

Top board results

Sasikiran (TN,3) bt R Kashelkar (Mah, 2); S Satyakam (Ori, 2.5) drew with Karthik (TN, 2.5); M Chokshi (Guj, 3) bt Rishipal Singh (AP, 2); CJ Aravind(TN, 2.5) drew with G Vinod (T.Nagar,2.5); Harikrishna (AP, 2) lost to Lakshminarayanan (Ker,3); Yeshwant Shenoy (Kar) 2 lost to MR Venkatesh (TN, 3); S Kidambi (TN,2.5) bt Vikramaditya (Mah,2); Venkat (TN,2.5) bt Vivek Anand (Bih,1.5); P Mokal (Mah,1.5) lost to Tejas Bakre (IA,2); S Kutwal (Mah,1) lost to Sajesh (Ker,2); SK Jain (UP,1) lost to K Ramu (AP,2; Bharat Gupta (Raj) 2 bt Sujeesh K (Ker,1); Salilkumar (Ker,1) lost to Ratnakaran (Ker,2), S Kherdekar (Mah,2) bt Pradeeep Kumar (Ker,1)

GIRLS: Swati Mohota (WB,3) bt PL Sivakami (TN,2); Ananya Sarkar (GNCA,3) bt Nisha Mohota (WB,2); Pallavi Shah (Mah,3) bt Manasi Dadarkar (Mah,2); S Sujatha (TN,2) lost to Meenakshi (TN,3); Chitra Sridhar (Kar,2.5) bt M Priyadarshini (TN,2); Moutry Padma (AP,1.5) lost to Charanya (T Nagar, 2.5); Ashwini Puchpurkar (Mah,2) bt Baisakhi Das (WB,1.5); P Vijayalakshmi (AP,1) lost to Ashwini Kulkarni (Mah,2); Sasinas Haritha (Ker,2) bt Monalisa Malakar (WB,1); Arvind Lochanai (AP,2) bt S Cynthia (TN,1); Pratibha (GSWCA,2) bt Kavitha (AP,1); K Prajeesha (Ker,1) lost to N Sandhya (Ker,2)