Manish Anto, Divya Win National U-11 Titles

Manish Anto, Divya Win National U-11 Titles
By Arvind Aaron

Manish Anto Cristiano of Tamil Nadu and Divya Deshmukh of Maharashtra won the National Under-11 titles at Raipur on July 6, 2016.

The Suresh Agrawal Memorial 30th National Under-11 Chess Championships took place at Shri Ramswaroop Niranjanlal Dharamshala in VIP Road in Raipur. The Chief Arbiter was IA Ambrish C Joshi. It was organised by the Raipur Chess Academy under the auspices of the Raipur District and Chhatisgarh State Associations from June 28 to July 6, 2016. A total 140 boys and 82 girls took part in this edition which is the selection event for India in the World Under-12 and Asian Under-12 of 2017.

In the closely fought Open section, Tamil Nadu players swept the podium with F Manish Anto Cristiano winning the title on better tie-break than team-mate M Pranesh, both scoring 9/11. Manish Anto lost to Gukesh (AP), drew Pranesh, Bharath Subramaniyam H and beat the rest. He gained 152.40 Elo starting as seed No. 17 from this single event.

Seed No. 10 Pranesh finished second and gained 76.4 Elo. He too lost one game, drew two and won the rest. All the 142 players suffered atleast one defeat. Top seed Raunak Sadhwani of Nagpur lost three games and finished with 7/11 losing 114 Elo.

In the Girls’ section, top seed Divya Deshmukh of Nagpur won the title with 10/11 by a clear one point margin. Rakshitta Ravi took second place with nine points. In this section too all players suffered atleast one defeat. But Divya and Rakshitta pulled ahead of the rest of the players. Divya beat Rakshitta and lost to N Satwika.

Final placings (tie-break order)

Open: 1-2. F Manish Anto Cristiano (TN), M Pranesh (TN) 9/11 each; 3-6. S Rohith Krishna (TN), V Pranav (TN), Sreeshwan Maralakshikari (Tel), Mahitosh Dey (Odi) 8.5 each; 7-10. L.R. Srihari (TN), Harshit Ranjan Sahu (Odi), Bharath Subramaniyam H (TN), Samip Roy (WB) 8 each.

Girls: 1 Divya Deshmukh (Mah) 10/11; 2 Rakshitta Ravi (TN) 9; 3-5. Bhagyashree Patil (Mah), Kriti Mayur Patel (Mah), Dhyana Patel (Guj) 8 each; 6-9. N Satwicka (AP), Alaina Vincent (Mah), Chinnam Vyshnavi (AP), C Tina (TN) 7.5 each; 10. S Vijayasubasri (TN) 7.