After fighting it out in the first eight rounds, the top rated players settled for short draws amongst themselves in the 9th round of the Mumbai Mayor’s Cup-International Chess tournament conducted by Venus Chess Academy and co sponsored by LIC of India.
Only two more rounds remain of this 335 player Swiss League event which is in progress at the Chetana College.
Interestingly the two top boards featured all the four overnight sole leaders on seven points and within no time and just a few moves Nikolai Chadaev had signed truce with Aleksej Aleksandrov, the top rated player in the 11 round Swiss League event.
John Paul Gomez also played a very short draw against Andrei Deviatkin while the GM Abijit Kunte versus Deepan Chakravarthy encounter was also a short affair.
GM Andrei Deviatkin
This means by inching half a point forward, the top board leader position more or less remained same but B Adhiban, the highest rated Indian player in fray defeated Hungarian GM Hoang Thanh Trang in a long game to join the overnight four joint leaders, Alexandrov, Chadaev, Gomez and Deviatkin at the top of the points tally, each totaling 7.5 points.
