Nagpur: Bihar’s Rudra Pratap and Liyaa Krishnan of Mumbai emerged national U-7 chess champions in contrasting fashion on Saturday.While Rudra suffered his first defeat in the last round of the tournament, a better progressive score helped the wonder boy from Bihar to lift the Open title, Liyaa kept her slate clean to emerge as the girls’ champion with a full nine points.In the ninth and final round, overnight leader Rudra failed to utilise his opening advantage with the white pieces against Karnataka’s Nimalan Dharanipathy to lose the contest, while fifth seed Aksh Shrivastava outclassed Joshua Magnus Katarapu on the second board to take his tally of points to eight. At the end, the open group saw a three-way tie, with Rudra, Nimalan and Aksh finishing the tournament collecting eight points each.A better tie-break score of 51.5 gave Rudra the first position, while Aksh (48) finished second and Nimalan (46) completed the podium finish.In the girls section, Liyaa Krishnan defended well with her black pieces to outplay Punjab’s Myra Rathore and register a table-top finish with a full nine points. Aaditri Majumdar of West Bengal and Karnataka’s Rihanshi Munagala completed the podium finish.Both the champions were richer by Rs 50,000. The prizes were distributed by the hands of Vidarbha’s first GM Swapnil Dhopade and Sankalp Gupta. On the occasion, Amit Gandhare of Raisoni Group, Bhushan Shriwas, Ankush Raktade, Vilas Mhatre, Ninant Pednekar and others were present.
