PANAJI: Nodirbek Yakubboev of Uzbekistan, who famously played chess as a part of his wedding celebrations, ended the honeymoon run of homeboy V Pranav in the Chess World Cup on Wednesday.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Vietnam’s Le Quang Liem showed why he was rated so highly (Elo 2729) as he outplayed twice national champion Karthik Venkataraman to enter the pre-quarterfinals that begin on Friday.
Twenty-two players will play 11 tiebreaks matches of shorter time controls on Thursday as only five players could advance via twogame mini matches of classical time control. With the defeats of Pranav and Karthik — with similar scorelines of 0.5-1.5 — only three of the 24 Indians remain in the knockout tournament.R Praggnanandhaa, Erigaisi Arjun and P Harikrishna stretched their matches against Russian Daniil Dubov, Peter Leko of Hungary and Nils Grandelius of Sweden respectively in tiebreaks after drawing their second games too. Levon Aronian (Armenia), Jose Eduardo Martinez Alcantara (Mexico) and Alexander Donchenko (Germany) also advanced to the last 16 and they will get a rest day on Thursday.It was a heartbreaking day for Pranav as he lost in 38 moves from the white side of the Scotch opening.He was visibly upset after being forced to resign, regretting his inaccuracy and oversight. He signed the scoresheet and trudged back cursing himself. Yakubboev, having won a rook for bishop, had cooked a brutal attack. Liem, playing black, converted a gripping endgame of rook, knight and pawns vs bishop, knight and pawns to send Karthik packing.Germany’s Matthias Blubaum, the only remaining player in the meet who has already qualified for the Candidates (via FIDE Grand Swiss), lost to close friend Donchenko. Martinez and Aronian, the only two players who had taken the lead via wins in the first games, were expected to progress. They did, but not without a twist.Martinez created a decisive advantage with white against Alexey Sarana of Serbia, but opted for a draw via three-fold repetition; and Aronian went rook down against Radoslaw Wojtaszek of Poland but still managed to split a point, thanks to the power of extra and advancing connected pawns that liquidated the material.
