Torre, Paragua in contention; Bong out

Doha, Qatar — RP bets GM Eugene Torre and IM Mark Paragua opted to play it safe while the rest fought for wins, drawing their respective games in yesterday’s penultimate round and keeping their hopes alive for a top 10 finish in the Asian Men’s Championship.

Torre held his ground against Indian IM Tejas Bakre in a Ruy Lopez Exchange to halve the point in 29 moves while Paragua failed to cash in on a slight positional advantage and drew with another Indian, GM Abhijit Kunte, in 25 moves of a Reti Opening.

The draws, however, dropped them from seventh to 14th places in the seventh round to ninth to 17th places with five points going into the final round of the nine-round Swiss event that stakes 10 berths to the FIDE World Championship late this year.

GM Bong Villamayor, the last of the three local bets participating here, found his pet French Defense smothered by Uzbek GM Sergey Zagrabelny in 36 moves to crash out of contention.

Villamayor’s loss left Torre and Paragua, who are a full point behind leaders GM Darmen Sadvakasov of Kazakhstan, GM Krishnan Sasikiran of India and GM Ghaem Maghami of Iran, with a realistic chance of landing a place in the magic 10.

Torre, Asia’s first GM, and Paragua are expected to go all out for victory today against opponents with contrasting strengths.

Both playing white, Torre takes on lowly Qatari Kadhi Hamed M Ali while Paragua battles Indian fifth seed Surya Shekhar Ganguly, an IM with a FIDE rating of 2556.

Villamayor, who skidded to 32nd to 41st places out of 54 participants, hopes to save face and pride as he also shoots for a victory against IM Sundararajan Kidambi of India.