India to field 3rd team

Chennai, July 3: India will field a third team in the Open section of the 44th Chess Olympiad to be held at Mamallapuram near here from July 28 to August 10, the All India Chess Federation (AICF) said on Sunday.
With a record 187 teams registering for the Open section and to even out the number of entries as per norm, FIDE (world chess federation) approved a third team from the host country.
The Indian ‘A’ team will start as the third seeds in the Open section and the ‘B’ team will be the 11th seeds. In the women’s event, the host’s ‘A’ team including Koneru Humpy and D Harika, will be the top-seed, while the ‘B’ team will be seeded 12th.
Grandmasters Surya Shekhar Ganguly, Karthikeyan Murali, SP Sethuraman, Abhijeet Gupta and Abhimanyu Puranik would form part of the third Indian team which received a last-minute entry with GM Tejas Bakre as the captain.
While the India ‘A’ team comprises Vidit Gujrathi, P Harikrishna, Arjun Erigaisi, SL Narayanan, K Sasikiran and have an average rating of 2696, the ‘B’ team (average rating 2649) includes Nihal Sarin, D Gukesh, B Adhiban, R Praggnanandhaa, Raunak Sadhwani.
“This is the best gift India could have ever got. Difficult to imagine even in the wildest dreams that 25 Indians would be competing together in an Olympiad,” AICF secretary Bharat Singh Chauhan said.
Each country can field only one team of five players (4 playing in every round) but as a host, India is entitled to field a minimum two teams and a maximum three teams in each category if the total participating number of countries is odd in number. (PTI)