Sasikiran storms into pre-quarters

Grandmaster Krishnan Sasikiran stormed into the pre-quarterfinals of the World Chess Cup defeating Bartlomiej Macieja of Poland in both the blitz tiebreak games of the third round in Khanty-Mansiysk (Russia).

Sasikiran, who had been stretched to the tiebreak games in the first two rounds as well, displayed his growing acumen in the faster version of the game again and downed Macieja with some fine planning after drawing both the rapid games as well.

The Indian, incidentally, became the first Indian since former World Cup winner Viswanthan Anand to reach the fourth round of the World Cup bettering the record of P Harikrishna a couple of years back.

In the next round, Sasikiran meets a formidable opponent in former World champion Ruslan Ponomariov of Ukraine. 

The tiebreaker of the fourth round also witnessed the biggest upset of the event as top seed Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine was knocked out by Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu of Romania in the blitz games.

This tiebreaker was quite exciting too as both players won one game each in the rapid games before the blitz wherein Nisipeanu capitalised on an optical blunder by Ivanchuk.

Interestingly, the second seed Shakhriyar Mamedyarov was also earlier eliminated from the cup in the normal games itself when he found Ivan Cheparinov of Bulgaria 'too hot to handle'.