Chess
Pune Women's Grand Prix: Vaishali registers her first win of the tournament
With this win, India now has four players in the top-five of the competition after the five rounds.
GM Rameshbabu Vaishali finished in fourth place at the FIDE Women's Grand Prix Grosslobming. (File photo)
Grandmaster (GM) Vaishali Rameshbabu broke the streak of draws to register her first win of the tournament in the fifth round of the 2024-25 FIDE Women's Grand Prix series in Pune on Friday.
The other top Indian women continued their quality play as Divya Deshmukh, Koneru Humpy and Harika Dronavalli played out draws in their respective matches.
With this, India now has four players in the top-five on the leaderboard, which is currently led by Zhu Jiner (4/5) of China.
Jiner, incidentally survived a scare against Nurgyul Salimova of Bulgaria in her fifth round match.
In the only decisive match of the day, Vaishali got the better of Batkhuyag Munguntuul of Mongolia, who had an off day with a poor accuracy of 86.2, which was way behind Vaishali's 95.2.
Vaishali now has 2.5/5 points and is currently sitting in the fifth position, tied with Polina Shuvalova of FIDE, who drew her match in round-5 against another Indian player Divya Deshmukh (3/5/5).
Meanwhile, in an all-Indian clash between the two most experienced Indian players, Humpy (3.5/5) and Harika (3/5), ended in a quick draw in just 19 moves.
Humpy and Divya maintained their position (tied for second) before going into the crucial rest day, after which they will return for the final four rounds of action.
