Aarthie suffers shock defeat

International Women's Master Koneru Humpy made a winning start to her campaign but her Indian compatriot and girls' top seed Aarthie Ramaswamy was shocked by Uzbek opponent Elena Levushkina in the Asian junior chess championship in Bombay on Wednesday.

In the under 19 boys' section, title-favourite and International Master P Harikrishna, playing white, outclassed Vikramaditya Kamble in 39 moves in an all-Indian first round clash.

Koneru, with an elo rating of 2288 which is next only to world under-18 champion Arthie's 2319 in the competition, defeated Filipino girl Beverly Mendoza in 38 moves while IWM Swati Ghate defeated J E Kavitha in an all-Indian clash.

But the defeat of Aarthie against Elena, with a rating of more than 200 points adrift of the title-favourite, on the top board was the talk of the day.

Aarthie played e4 and the Uzbek girl replied with Petroff defence - copycat system. On the 24th move the Indian girl played Bf5 which was a blunder which was replied with Qc6 by Elena to force exchange of queens and also left two white pieces in precarious position.

The game ended in favour of the Uzbek after 29 moves when Aarthie called it quits.

In the game between Beverly and Humpy on the second board the former played e4 and her Indian rival replied with c6. The game later transposed into Caro-Kann Pano-Botvinnik variation.

In the middle game Humpy got control of the c file. On the 31st move her rival lost an isolated d pawn. Bervely later got back the lost pawn, before losing the game under time pressure on the 38th move.

The fourth International Woman Master in the fray, Nisha Mohata, defeated her Indian compatriot Y Pratibha.

In the boys' section Kamble replied with the King's Indian Gallagher system to Harikrishna's d4 opening. The former blundered on the 20th move by exchanging his knight on b6 with his rival's misplaced knight on a4.

Kamble's position progressively weakened and he also wasted his moves. He was forced to resign on the 39th move.

India's Tejas Bakre, an International Master (IM), defeated Sri Lanka's P M A B Athukorala while his compatriots Valay Parikh and C J Arvind got the better of their Australian and Pakistani rivals Mathew Sonter and Syed Hassan respectively.

India's Arjun Tiwari and Mahesh Chandran lost to their rivals Mark Paragua of the Philippines and Ghaem Maghami of Iran respectively.

In other matches the host nation's Himanshu Kumar and S R Misra lost to Enamul Hossain of Bangladesh and Qatar's Al Sayed Mohammed.

In two other all-India clashes IM Neelotpal Das prevailed over Prathmesh Mokal while Satyapragyan defeated Akshayraj Kore.