Aurangabad: Second-seeded Abhijeet Gupta stunned overnight leader S.P. Sethuraman's four-game winning sequence with a fine victory and snatched the lead in the fifth round of the National chess championship at the MIT campus here on Thursday.

Abhijeet's fourth victory raised his tally to 4.5 points and set up a clash with third-seeded G.N. Gopal. Gopal joined Sethuraman at four points after beating his long-time coach, veteran International Master Varugeese Koshy.

In the biggest upset of the event, top seed and defending champion Parimarjan Negi crashed to a shock loss at the hands of Padmini Rout in 38 moves to give the Orissa girl the most memorable victory of her career.

The results (fifth round): Abhijeet Gupta (4.5) bt S.P. Sethuraman (4); G.N. Gopal (4) bt Varugeese Koshy (3); Aswin Jayaram (3.5) drew with Tejas Bakre (3.5); Deepan Chakkravarthy (3.5) drew with M.R. Venkatesh (3.5); S. Kidambi (2.5) lost to Deep Sengupta (3.5); B. Adhiban (3) drew with S. Satyapragyan (3); Abhijit Kunte (3) drew with R.R. Laxman (3); Shyam Sundar (3) drew with S. Arun Prasad (3); Vidit Gujrathi (3) drew with Sriram Jha (3); M.R. Lalith Babu (3) drew with Swapnil Dhopade (3); Parimarjan Negi (2) lost to Padmini Rout (3); B.T. Murali Krishnan (3) bt Neelotpal Das (2); Vikramaditya Kulkarni (3) bt Swati Ghate (2); N. Srinath (2) lost to Pravin Thipsay (3); Anup Deshmukh (2) lost to Shyam Nikhil (2); P. Karthikeyan (3) bt G. Akash (2); Diptayan Ghosh (2) lost to Saptarshi Roy (3); Himanshu Sharma (1.5) lost to Girish Koushik (2.5); Aditya Udeshi (2.5) bt Suvrajit Saha (1.5); Arjun Tiwari (1) lost to K. Ratnakaran (2); Rahul Sangma (2) bt N. Sudhakar Babu (1); P. Konguvel (1.5) drew with S. Ravi Teja (1.5); Dinesh Sharma (1.5) drew with Shashikant Kutwal (1.5); C.R.G. Krishna (1) drew with Soumya Swaminathan (1.5) .

The Hindu