Neelotpal, Humpy score victories

 Grandmaster Neelotpal Das and Koneru Humpy scored contrasting wins in their Round 3 matches at the Commonwealth Chess Championship here on Wednesday.

However, Woman Grandmaster Tania Sachdev struggled to win on yet another frustrating day and she eventually had to settle for a draw in a game that lasted for over three and a half hours. After round three, with one win, one loss and one draw, Sachdev has one and a half points.

Top seed and rating favourite Abhijeet Gupta maintained his winning run with a fairly convincing third consecutive victory. He beat K. Praneeth Surya in 21 moves.

Playing the white side of a King’s Indian defense, Gupta employed his pet Saemisch variation and Surya fell prey to a recently popular variation in the middle game. Abhijeet got a strong king side attack and crashed through the King side with his queen, knight and rook.

"My opponent didn't play the opening well and by the 17th move it was a struggle for him, I wrapped the game in 21 moves," said Gupta.

Round 3: Abhijeet Gupta bt K Praneeth Surya; Koneru Humpy bt Sk Ahmed Nasir; Deep Sengupta bt C Sai Vishwesh; Laltih Babu MR bt Raghunandan; Vr Aravind Chithambaram drew Krishna Teja N; Murali Karthikeyan bt Niranjan Navalgund; Abhijit Kunte bt R Vaishali; Rahman Ziaur bt Abhishek Das; RR Laxman bt Arjun Erigaisi; Soumya Swaminathan drew Nihal Sarin; Mary Ann Gomes bt Francois Oberholzer; Kiran Manisha Mohanty bt Shubham Kaushik; Tania Sachdev drew Shailesh Dravid.