K Humpy outplays Munguntuul in at FIDE Women's Grand Prix

Pune: Koneru Humpy and Batkhuyag Munguntuul of Mongolia faced off for the first time in 1999 during the World U-12 girls’ championship. Five of the other eight players from the ongoing FIDE Women’s Grand Prix here were not even born at that time.

Humpy, 38, used all her experience to take the game to unknown territory and scored a full point against Munguntuul in the sixth round by sacrificing material for the winning advantage on Sunday.

With Zhu Jiner avenging her World Blitz meet defeat to R Vaishali, Humpy could not join the Chinese as the joint leader. But with 98% accuracy in the win with black pieces, she won’t be short on confidence. Zhu retained sole leadership on five points followed by Humpy on 4.5 points with three rounds to go.

Humpy will play with white pieces against Zhu in a potential decider in the seventh round on Monday. Humpy took her game to the Ulvestad Variation (Two Knights in Italian opening) with a pawn push on the fifth move -- a variation not to be found in the database of both players.

Though Munguntuul did not fall for the gambit, her Qf3 --threatening a Mate in 1 –appeared out of her depth; and the subsequent play indicated that she was probably not familiar with the structure. Humpy co-ordinated her pieces and launched a deadly kingside attack against the castled king, punishing the earlier Qf3.

She had castled her own king on the opposite side and then moved it to b8 and guarded it against any attack. With pawns marching ahead in ‘e’, ‘f’ and ‘g’ files and double rooks on the ‘h’ file with queen on g6, it looked lost for the Mongolian. Humpy gave away two rooks for the rival queen and activated her knight and bishop.

The potent pawns had done the damage by exposing the white king. It was Munguntuul’s sixth decisive and fourth defeat. Zhu Jiner had lost a four-game quarterfinal to Vaishali in the World Blitz in New York in Dec. But the Chinese won a complicated endgame against the Indian on Sunday involving mutual and multiple inaccuracies around the 20th move of the Sicilian Rossolimo.

When the dust settled, Zhu was a knight-up in the queen and pawns endgame.