Nagpur, August 03, 2023: The battle of wits between two Asian women chess champions in the first game of second round in the FIDE World Cup ended in a draw in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Wednesday.
The reigning Continental chess queen Divya Deshmukh defended brilliantly with her black pieces as the Asian women’s champion of 2000 and Vietnamese-born Hungarian Grandmaster (GM) Hoang Thanh Trang was forced to offer a draw to her 17-year-old opponent.
Divya — Nagpur’s only International Master (IM) among women — under tremendous time pressure, tactically made some inaccurate moves and brought the position almost like equal as both the former and current Asian champions decided to sign the peace treaty in 41 moves but after an over four-hour strategic fight.
With the white pieces, the 2402 Elo but an experienced 43-year-old Hoang opted for the Queen’s Pawn opening which the 2400-rated Divya responded in a similar fashion.
After a couple of inaccurate moves on the seventh and 15th turns, Divya made a mistake on the 23rd move by bringing her queen in front to the left corner but became a pawn up. With Divya critically low on time as against 15 extra minutes for Hoang, she made another inaccurate move on the 29th turn. Divya’s tactics paid dividends as Hoang took over six minutes to tackle an attacking queen but ended up committing a mistake on the 32nd move according to the reports published in timesofindia.indiatimes.com.
Thereafter, the Knight vs Bishop endgame remained equal as both the masters split the points.
In a chat with TOI Divya said, “The position was heading towards a draw, and we were left with no option but to split the points. Time constraints were there but the position was equal, so I decided not to push much.”
On Thursday, Divya will start with the white pieces in the second game and will be looking forward to utilizing opening advantage.
