New Delhi: Grandmaster and former champion Abhijeet Gupta cruised to his sixth victory on the trot defeating fellow Grandmaster M.R. Lalith Babu in the sixth round of the Commonwealth Chess Championship here on Saturday.
On what turned out to be an easy day for the top seed, Gupta employed his pet Grunfeld defense as black and Lalith Babu went for a variation favoured by Vladimir Kramnik recently. As it turned out in the middle game, things did not go Babu’s way as he missed out on a tactical trick and lost a pawn.
There was compensation as the game was still around the boundaries of a draw but Babu again faltered and entered a worse endgame after which it was a long grind and Gupta made no mistakes to maintain a clean slate. Defending champion Deep Sengupta kept pace with Gupta after a fine victory over Ankit Rajpara.
