Khadem Pounces On Blunder To Beat Harika
IM Sara Khadem pounced on a time-trouble blunder by GM Harika Dronavalli to pick up the only win of round two of the 2025 Monaco FIDE Women's Grand Prix. She joins GM Kateryna Lagno, GM Koneru Humpy, and IM Batkhuyag Munguntuul in the lead on 1.5/2, with the biggest miss of the day coming when GM Tan Zhongyi allowed Munguntuul to escape.
Round three starts on Thursday, February 20, at 3 a.m. ET / 15:00 CET / 1:30 p.m. IST.
Monaco FIDE Women's Grand Prix Round 2 Results
That meant that Khadem joined a pack of four leaders, while Harika is yet to get off the mark.
Monaco FIDE Women's Grand Prix Standings After Round 2
There were four draws in round two, but in each of them one player had a significant advantage at some point in the game. GM Elisabeth Paehtz got the better of Humpy on the black side of a Queen's Gambit Accepted, but liquidations just before the time control saw the advantage evaporate fast.
IM Bibisara Assaubayeva played the King's Indian Defense against GM Kateryna Lagno. As is often the case with that double-edged opening, the computer gave White a big advantage, but one concrete move, 18.b4!?, and suddenly Assaubayeva was able to solve all her problems.
The final stages saw both players find essential resources to hold the balance.
Former Women's World Champion Alexandra Kosteniuk is, like Paehtz, now 40 years old, but it turns out there are still new things to try. She said of the French Defense she played against GM Aleksandra Goryachkina, "I was happy after the opening because it was not my very first game in the French Defense, but one of the very few I’ve played."
The experience could have gone better, since Kosteniuk confessed, "When I played 22...e4!? I overestimated my position."
She also failed to see a back-rank checkmate trick in advance and was briefly in serious danger, but Goryachkina didn't find the best continuation and, while she played on until move 69, she had no realistic winning chances.
The closest we came to a win in the drawn games was in Tan's clash with Munguntuul. The former—and she'll hope soon-to-be-future—world champion had outplayed her opponent and was two pawns up in an endgame.
Munguntuul's hopes lay in her passed c-pawn, but it seems Tan would have had the advantage if she'd pushed her own a-pawn. Instead she let all her hard work come to nothing in the space of three knight moves.
Tan is looking rusty, for now, in the run-up to the women's world championship match against reigning Women's World Champion Ju Wenjun.
The one decisive game of the round saw Harika on the offensive for most of the clash, but she made her 37th move with just two seconds to spare, and then completely failed to spot the point of Khadem's 38.Rd2!, leaving the e5-pawn undefended. 38...Nxe5?? was a terrible mistake that lost on the spot.
Harika will have White against Lagno in round three as she tries to recover from that brutal finish and get on the scoreboard.
Round 3 Pairings
How to watch?
You can watch the broadcast on FIDE's YouTube channel. The games can also be checked out on our dedicated 2025 Monaco FIDE Women's Grand Prix events page.
The 2025 Monaco FIDE Women's Grand Prix is the third of six legs of the 2024-2025 FIDE Women's Grand Prix. The 10-player round-robin runs February 18-27 in Monaco. Players have 90 minutes, plus 30 minutes from move 40, with a 30-second increment per move. The top prize is €18,000 (~$20,000), with players also earning Grand Prix points. Each of the 20+ players competes in three events; the top two qualify for the 2026 FIDE Women's Candidates Tournament that decides the World Championship challenger.
Previous Coverage:
Colin McGourty led news at Chess24 from its launch until it merged with Chess.com a decade later. An amateur player, he got into chess writing when he set up the website Chess in Translation after previously studying Slavic languages and literature in St. Andrews, Odesa, Oxford, and Krakow.
