Aurangabad: Abhijeet Gupta (seven points) drew with Tejas Bakre to maintain his half-point lead after the ninth round of the National chess championship at the MIT campus here on Monday.
The results (ninth round):
Abhijeet Gupta (7) drew with Tejas Bakre (6); G.N. Gopal (6.5) drew with Deepan Chakkravarthy (6.5); Shyam Nikhil (6.5) bt Deep Sengupta (5); P. Karthikeyan (5) lost to S.P. Sethuraman (6); Abhijit Kunte (6) bt M.R. Venkatesh (5); M.R. Lalith Babu (5) lost to S. Arun Prasad (6); Ashwin Jayaram (5.5) drew with Sriram Jha (5.5); Shyam Sundar (5.5) bt Padmini Rout (5); Parimarjan Negi (5.5) bt Swapnil Dhopade (4.5); Vikramaditya Kulkarni (4.5) lost to G. Akash (5.5); B. Adhiban (5) bt Girish Koushik (4); Vidit Gujarathi (5) bt K. Ratnakaran (4); S. Kidambi (4.5) drew with Pravin Thipsay (4.5); Aditya Udeshi (4.5) drew with R.R. Laxman (4.5); B.T. Murali Krishnan (4.5) drew with Saptarshi Roy (4.5); P. Konguvel (3.5) lost to Neelotpal Das (4.5); Himanshu Sharma (4.5) bt C.R.G. Krishna (3.5).
S. Satyapragyan (4.5) bt Diptayan Ghosh (3.5); Varugeese Koshy (3) lost to Shashikant Kutwal (4.5); Dinesh Sharma (3.5) drew with N. Sudhakar Babu (3.5); Anup Deshmukh (3) lost to N. Srinath (4); Rahul Sangma (3) drew with Soumya Swaminathan (3); Swati Ghate (2).
The Hindu