G B Prakash takes sole lead

Grandmaster-norm holder G B Prakash of Indian Bank shot into sole lead on five points with a well-crafted victory over IM-norm holder Suvrajit Saha of Railways in the fifth round of the Global Trust Bank International Rating Chess tournament in Hyderabad on Saturday.

Prakash is followed in the second place by 11 players -- IM Ravi Hegde (Union Bank), IM Shankar Roy (Railways), N Sanjay (Karnataka), Saptarshi Roy Chowdhury (Bengal), Vishal Sareen (LIC), Rishipal Singh, Y Kalyan Kumar, J Malleshwar Rao, M Y Raju (all Andhra Pradesh), Poobesh Anand (Tamil Nadu) and R K Mishra (MP) - with 4.5 points each.

On a day of upsets, three IMs were forced to bite the dust against their less fancied opponents.

Second seed IM Neelotpal Das of Goodricke National Chess Academy went down to local lad Rishipal Singh from the black side of an English opening game.

Rishipal got into the groove soon in the middlegame after getting miniscule advantage and capitalised on a tactical oversight by Neelotapl to win a pawn.

In the time scramble Neelotpal could not sustain the tremendous pressure and lost a piece to call it a day after 37 moves.

IM N Sudhakar Babu of Indian Bank lost to youngster Poobesh Anand in a Nimzo-Witsch defence game with black pieces.

Having equalised comfortably in the opening Babu manoeuvred his forces well to win a pawn but misplayed the middlegame to go down.

Kalyan Kumar continued with his excellent run in the tournament with yet another prized scalp of IM Neeraj Kumar Mishra of Tata Steel.

Playing white, Kalyan opted for his usual Colle system and let Mishra equalise comfortably. Mishra tried to enthuse life in a level position with some positional inaccuracies and was soon punished with a picturesque Knight sacrifice that netted Kalyan Kumar an exchange and a pawn.

Prakash caught Suvrajit unawares in an apparently equal position arising out of a Slav exchange.

Having completed his development with white pieces, the Grandmaster-in-waiting played a harmless looking move, the nuances of which were obviously missed by Suvrajit who lost a rook for Bishop.

The resulting endgame posed some difficulties but Prakash made it look easy with his precise technique.

IM Ravi Hegde played a quick draw with Sanjay while Saptarshi held on to his own in a slightly worse position against S Satyapragyan of Orissa to steer the game to a draw.