After Gukesh’s exit, spotlight on Erigaisi, Pragg at FIDE World Cup

Bengaluru: India’s leading Grandmasters Arjun Erigaisi, R Praggnanandhaa and P Harikrishna will look to continue their impressive run when the fourth round of the FIDE World Cup gets underway here after the first rest day.

Arjun, the country’s highest-rated player, will start as the favourite against veteran Hungarian Peter Leko, while Praggnanandhaa faces the inventive Daniil Dubov, who is playing under the FIDE flag. Harikrishna, the most experienced of the trio, takes on Sweden’s Nils Grandelius as he aims to stay firmly in contention.

Leko, a formidable force about 20 years back, is showing signs of his prime but may not find things easy against Arjun, who likes to go for extreme complexities.

The 46-year-old defeated Bobby Cheng of Australia and Kiriil Alekseenko of Austria without any tiebreak games which speaks volumes about his quality of play.

Incidentally, Leko is a semi-retired player and his protégé Vincent Keymer of Germany is also in the fourth round, making it a rare case of ‘Guru and Shisya’ going deep in a knockout competition.

Arjun won both his matches without any tiebreak. The Indian has won three out of his four games thus far under the classical time control and has shown the exit door to Martin Petrov of Bulgaria and Shamsiddin Vokhidov of Uzbekistan in the process.

Crowd favourite R Praggnanadhaa, meanwhile, is set to meet Dubov, known for his work as a theoretician. The Russian is also a dangerous opponent in the faster time control. He came through two tiebreak marathons against Bai Jinshi of China and Georg Meier of Uruguay, excelling due to speed and accuracy. Praggnanadhaa was close to being eliminated in his first outing in the second round itself but somehow survived in the tiebreaker against Uzbek-Australian Temur Kuybokarov before prevailing over his third-round rival Robert Hovhannisyan of Armenia.

Harikrishna, on the other hand, had a smooth sailing to the Round of 32 with comprehensive victories.