Aurangabad: Abhijeet Gupta stayed ahead of the field with a comfortable 32-move draw with fellow Grandmaster S. Arun Prasad in the seventh round of the National chess championship at the MIT campus here on Saturday.
The second seed from Bharat Petroleum raised his tally to 5.5 points and retained the overnight half-point lead.
The results (seventh round):
Abhijeet Gupta (5.5) drew with S. Arun Prasad (4.5); Deepan Chakkravarthy (5) drew with S.P. Sethuraman (5); Abhijit Kunte (4.5) drew with G.N. Gopal (5); Deep Sengupta (5) bt Saptarshi Roy (4); Vikramaditya Kulkarni (4.5) drew with Tejas Bakre (4.5); M.R. Venkatesh (5) bt Padmini Rout (4); P. Karthikeyan (4.5) drew with Aswin Jayaram (4); B. Adhiban (4) drew with Pravin Thipsay (4); Shyam Sundar (4.5) bt Girish Koushik (3.5); B.T. Murali Krishnan (3.5) lost to Shyam Nikhil (4.5); S. Kidambi (3) lost to Sriram Jha (4.5); Vidit Gujarathi (3.5) drew with S. Satyapragyan (3.5); M.R. Lalith Babu (3.5) drew with Varugeese Koshy (3.5); Swapnil Dhopade (3.5) drew with Neelotpal Das (3.5); G. Akash (3.5) drew with R.R. Laxman (3.5); Rahul Sangma (2.5) lost to Parimarjan Negi (3.5); Himanshu Sharma (3.5) bt Swati Ghate (2.5); Aditya Udeshi (3) drew with K. Ratnakaran (3); Diptayan Ghosh (3) drew with N. Sudhakar Babu (2.5).
P. Konguvel (3) bt Suvrajit Saha (2); Dinesh Sharma (3) bt S. Ravi Teja (2); Anup Deshmukh (2.5) drew with Shashikant Kutwal (2.5); N. Srinath (3) bt Soumya Swaminathan (1.5); Arjun Tiwari (1) lost to C.R.G. Krishna (2.5).
The Hindu