R B Ramesh made sure of a third and final Grandmaster norm on Wednesday, when he played a "lightning" quick draw against Russian Grandmaster Alexander Fominyh in the ninth round of the Parsvnath International Chess tournament in Delhi.
The Indian Oil player, who accepted a draw after just five moves, will get his final norm on Thursday when he plays GM Jonathan Rowson of Scotland, irrespective of the result.
According to the rules, Ramesh needs to play at least one foreign titled-player in the remaining rounds to make the cut. But the Chennai-based player, with a rating of 2466, will have to wait for his GM title as he needs to take his rating to 2500 in order to be eligible to become the tenth GM of the country.
Meanwhile, youngest Commonwealth champion Pendyala Harikrishna joined overnight leaders Ramesh and Fominyh in the lead with 7.5 points after defeating GM Surya Sekhar Ganguly in 30 moves.
Opting for a Queen's Gambit, Harikrishna got an advantage over Ganguly by the 24th move and made his opponent surrender six moves later, playing the correct continuations.
With just two rounds to go in the Rs 300,000 prize-money tournament, the race for the title is getting hotter, as ten players, including top seed GM Dmitry Svetushkin of Moldova, Rowson and IM Lanka Ravi, trail the leading trio by just half a point.
Meanwhile, Asian women's champion Grandmaster Koneru Humpy's wretched form returned after a day's gap as she went down to Manthan Chokshi in 32 moves.
This is the fourth defeat for the Andhra girl, who came into the championship as a favourite after winning the Saharanpur leg of the circuit last week.
In other top board games, Svetushkin drew with IM Neelotpal Das in 62 moves while Rowson defeated Rahul Shetty. Rahir Vakhidov of Uzbekistan got the better of Prathamesh Mokal.
Important ninth round results (All Indians if not mentioned otherwise): R B Ramesh 7.5 drew A Fominyh (RUS) 7.5; D Svetushkin 7.0 (MDA) drew Neelotpal Das 7.0; P Harikrishna 7.5 beat S S Ganguly 6.5; Rahul Shetty 6.0 lost to Jonathan Rowson (SCO) 7.0; Prathmesh Mokal 6.0 lost to Tahir Vakhidov (UZB) 7.0; Saidali Iuldachev (UZB) 7.0 beat P Konguvel 6.0; Sergei Ovsejevitsch (UKR) 7.0 beat N K Mishra 6.0; Marat Dzhumaev (UZB) 7.0 beat Himanshu Sharma 6.0; Sriram Jha 6.5 drew V Koshy 6.5; Lanka Ravi 7.0 beat Anup Deshmukh 6.0; M B Muralidharan 6.0 lost to Niaz Murshed (BAN) 7.0; Deep Sengupta 7.0 beat Saptarshi Roy Chowdhury 6.0; Sayantan Dutta 6.0 drew A Kunte 6.0; S Kidambi 6.0 drew Abhijeet Gupta 6.0; Vishal Sareen 6.0 drew K Ratnakaran 6.0; Arghyadip Das 5.5 lost to S Poobesh Anand 6.5; Nassir Wajih 5.5 lost to Syed Anwar Shazuli 6.5; R Balasubramanium 6.5 beat Amitpal Singh 5.5; Aarthie Ramaswamy 6.5 beat J K Choudhary 5.5, Akshay Raj Kore 6.5 beat D P Singh 5.5.
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