Ravi halts Devendra’s winning spree in LU chess

Fourth seeded Ravi Shanker halted the winning spree of top seeded Devendra Bajpai, drawing his fourth-round match in the Avinash Chandra Chaturvedi Memorial LU Open Chess Championship here on Wednesday. On the second board, second seeded Pawan Baatham defeated fifth seed Ashu Verma in Evans Gambit, whereas third seeded Hemant Sharma played Sicilian Paulson defense with black pieces and snatched full point from Ritikesh. On the fourth board PS Mehta defeated David Yung in an English opening. At the end of the fourth round, Pawan and Hemant were jointly leading with four points each. Devendra and Ravi Shankar were joint second with 3.5 points. They were followed by Nancy Bhardwaj, David Yung, Ashu Verma, PS Mehta, Ritikesh, Atul Kumar Shrivastava, Akash Saxena, Sunil Shrivastava, Archishman Shukla, Ramesh Kumar Gautam and Tufail Ahamad.

MOHIT SHINES

Mohit Yadav slammed a halfcentury as Jai Narain PG College (JNPGC) defeated BSNV PG College by six wickets to make it to the semi-finals of the 17th Chandra Bhanu Gupt Memorial Inter-Collegiate Cricket Tournament, at the CB Gupta Ground here on Wednesday. In other quarterfinal, National PG College got a walkover from Lucknow Public College, which failed to turn up.

WEEKLY BRIDGE

The duo of JS Kaul and TP Khare with 62.88 percent points won the match point pairs event of the Weekly Bridge Tournament, at the Lucknow Club here. The winners had nearly two breaks, and had had 11 tops, three above average scores and no zeros in their score. Mukul Goel-Arun Srivastava (62.88%) and Mukul Gupta-SA Abbasi (55.68%) finished second and third, respectively.