Team Chess Gurukul Wins Sukooon Resort Indian Chess.com League!
Team Chess Gurukul won the Sukooon Resort Indian Chess.com League by beating Team Superkids in a nail bitting Superfinal!
Team Superkids were clearly dominating in the first 30 minutes of the Superfinal with their star WIM Divya Deshmukh eliminating two star players from Team Chess Gurukul - WGM Vaishali R and IM Aditya Mittal.
It was down to #3 board player - GM Karthikeyan Murali to take control and lead his team which he did very well. He went on to defeat WIM Divya Deshmukh, GM Narayanan Srinath, GM Raunak Sadhwani, and drew against GM Arjun Erigaisi to setup a mouth-watering clash between his team-mate GM Praggnanandhaa and GM Nihal Sarin.
The battle between Pragg and Nihal made it a befitting final to watch where the game went down to the last seconds. Nihal had almost got the point home, but Praggnanandhaa kept posing some tactical challenges in the knight endgame and managed to hold the draw. With this draw, he helped the team to clinch the title!
Here's the final game between two superstars:
Annotations : msd238
The two teams topped the round-robin segment and qualified for the Superfinal on Sunday. All the other prizes were also announced after the event. Here is the list of prize winners:
The tournament was supported by Chess.com, Sukooon Resort, Desi Boys, Goan Chess Trio, Maestro Chess Academy and Chesslang.
One of the major highlights of the event was that Indian superstar -Viswanathan Anand inaugurated
the Superfinal.
India #2 Vidit Gujrathi also joined GM Abhijeet Gupta and IM Rakesh Kulkarni during the show. 
The core committee comprised of GM Priyadharshan Kannappan (League Commissioner), IM Rakesh Kulkarni (Chief Executive Officer) and FM Niranjan Navalgund (Chief Communication Officer). The arbiter team comprised of IA Swapnil Bansod, (Chief Arbiter) IA Vivek Sohani (Deputy arbiter) IA Ganesh Babu, (Deputy Arbiter) who made sure that the game results were updated on chess-results.com
You can download all the games of this tournament in PGN here
Superfinal games:
You can find the slides of all the prize winners here:
Currently work as a community manager for Chess.com India.
I have a GM norm and an IM norm. Became a FIDE Trainer recently. Coached two Indian Teams for the Olympiad for PWD. Apart from playing and teaching chess, I dabble in writing and reading. Can speak in English, Kannada, Hindi, Tamil and Marathi. I recently wrote a short story titled 'Over a Cup of Chai' that's available on amazon. My last novel 'The Lively Library & An Unlikely Romance' is a story of a library where books come to life at night.
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