18-year-old Indian Champion Arjun Erigaisi’s run of incredible results continued in the 1st leg of the MPL Indian Chess Tour as he scored +7 to clinch victory and a place not just in the MPL Indian Chess Tour final but in an upcoming stage of the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour. When asked his secret, Arjun echoed Bobby Fischer’s “I just got good”, as he stated, “things just started going my way”. Raunak Sadhwani took second, with Gukesh and Ganguly 3rd, while Harika Dronvalli just missed out on automatic qualification for the next tournament.
You can replay all the games from the 1st leg of the MPL Indian Chess Tour using the selector below.
And here’s the final day’s live commentary from Srinath Narayanan and Sahil Tickoo.
There’s just no stopping Arjun Erigaisi right now. A year ago he was barely on the radar of most chess observers, but after qualifying for and impressing on the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour he’s never looked back. This year alone he won the Tata Steel Challengers, then the Indian Championship and then the Delhi Open, with the latter providing the most impressive trophy!
Now it’s the 1st leg of the $100,000 MPL Indian Chess Tour, where Arjun started off slowly but then caught fire.
In fact it’s one of Arjun’s party tricks that he’s capable of setting extraordinary goals and then hitting them… exactly!
He managed the same thing again for the MPL Indian Chess Tour, but with a twist.
I got the exact score, but it didn’t go according to the plan. I was intending +2, +2, +2 and +1, but it turned out to be =, +3, +3 and +1!
+3 means having three more wins than losses, so in this case winning three games and drawing one. It was critical that Arjun completed that score on the 3rd day by winning the last game against Abhimanyu Puranik, who had stormed into the lead earlier with six wins in a row. It all came down to the theoretically drawn, but still very tricky to play, Rook + Bishop vs. Rook endgame.
Arjun’s victory put him three points (one win) clear going into the final day, when there would be just three games. “The training in Wijk paid off!” said Arjun, and it turned out that along with his coach (and our commentator) Srinath Narayanan and Surya Ganguly they’d looked at just this endgame.
Arjun then won the first game of the final day, against Sankalp Gupta, to take a five-point lead and move to the verge of overall victory. It didn’t prove as easy as you would expect for him to wrap things up, however. Arjun noted:
Since Day 2 I started taking it a bit seriously, and I think yesterday and the day before yesterday I played well. Today was a bit shaky, especially against Adhiban and Sethuraman. I was being a bit too desperate, I think.
Arjun pointed out he got into trouble in his penultimate round game with Sethuraman.
Against Sethu, I was better out of the opening and I could feel that, but I misplayed it terribly and he was pushing, and then in the end I managed to make a draw because of this Ne6 trick. If not for h4, I think it was a bit shaky.
38.h4 allowed an instant draw.
38…Ne6! 39.Nxe6 Qxh4+ 40.Kg1 Qe1+ and Arjun was able to force a draw with checks from e1 and h4.
That still wasn’t quite enough to clinch victory, so that there was a final, nervy game against Adhiban. The Beast’s tournament had been derailed by two earlier runs of three losses in a row, but he went for an enterprising opening involving pushing his h-pawn before Arjun finally got the draw he needed, in 46 moves.
Arjun was asked what the secret was behind his recent success.
There’s nothing particular. Things just started going my way, and earlier I was unfortunate in some ways.
That win means that Arjun is already qualified for the November final of the MPL Indian Chess Tour, while he’ll also get another chance to face Magnus Carlsen and co. on the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour.
There were some early frontrunners who faded away. We already mentioned Abhimanyu Puranik, who who six games in a row only to end with four losses in five games. Leon Mendonca was another leader who then went on a sequence of five losses in six games. In the end the player who pushed Arjun hardest was 16-year-old Raunak Sadhwani, who went into the last round knowing that if Arjun lost and he won he’d be the champion.
In the end neither of those required results happened, but Raunak still took clear 2nd place and had every reason to be proud of his performance.
There was a tie for third place between 15-year-old Gukesh, who was only slowed down by losing the first game of the final day, and the one “veteran” to star, 39-year-old Surya Ganguly.
It wasn’t just about the very top places in the tournament, since the Top 8 would get an automatic invite to the next leg of the Tour in June. To say it came down to the wire would be an understatement, since Murali Karthikeyan made the cut on tiebreaks, while Abhijeet Gupta and Harika Dronavalli just missed out despite posting the same score.
It was a remarkable turnaround for Harika, who didn’t score a win in her first nine games, while she suffered four losses. In hindsight we can say those were only against stars of the tournament — Erigaisi, Ganguly, Karthikeyan and Gukesh, while things turned around in Round 10 when Harika beat Sadhwani.
Raunak’s 16…Bh3? was a little too ambitious.
You can’t take on e5 immediately due to checkmate on f1, but Harika’s 17.Be3! was the one clearly winning move, including the a1-rook in the defence of f1 so that fxe5 is a threat, and also preparing Bd4. She went on to convert her advantage smoothly, and would win four and draw two of her last six games.
So that’s all for the first leg of the MPL Indian Chess Tour, but it’s just the beginning, with the second leg starting on June 2nd.
We hope you enjoyed the show!
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