Lady draw for Harikrishna

The No 3 and 4 seeds (Anand and Hari) along with No 6 seed Yu Yangyi of China find themselves sharing second place with 1.5 points each in a big bracket of 41 players. Amazingly, the list above them, the leaders with two points each, has 42 players including nine Indians. 

Among the leaders are SP Sethuraman, Sundararajan Kidambi, Aravindh Chithambaram, Dronavalli Harika, Lalith Babu, Anurag Mhamal, Abhijeet Gupta, Sandeepan Chanda 

and Vishnu Prasanna. 

Giving Anand and Hari company in second place are GN Gopal, Surya Sekhar Ganguly, Padmini Rout and Vidit Gujrathi. The contest would hot up from the third round onwards when the top guns meet equals on the top boards. Harikrishna could not break through the French Defence of Zhukova and landed in a rook and pawn ending after 52 moves. Anand, however, recovered from his first-round blues and outplayed Matthias Bach of Germany in Reti in 32 moves after creating a passed pawn in the centre. Anand has to forget these two rounds for a while as his German opponent was also rated 480 points below him.