Temur Kuybokarov failed to punish a below-par R Praggnandhaa, giving India No. 2 and his supporters a sigh of relief at the World Cup chess on Thursday. The Australian could not control his nerves and lost a golden chance to floor the second-seeded GM. M Pranesh and SL Narayanan punched slightly above their weight to advance to the third round. Defeats of No. 22 seed Nihal Sarin and Raunak Sadhwani earlier in the day had painted a gloomy picture for the host nation. But as the dust settled on the tense tiebreak games, five of the eight Indians, which included No. 19 seed Vidit Gujrathi stopping 12-year-old Faustino Oro of Argentina, progressed. That included V Pranav, but Murali Karthikeyan lost. Pragg was on the verge of elimination, and the 5-3 scoreline in no way suggests how lady luck smiled on him. He barely survived the second game of the first set of two-game tiebreaks of 15 minutes each. The 20-year-old then made an amateur-level mistake by grabbing a seventh-rank pawn with the bishop, overlooking a knight fork that would take away his rook in the third game of the tiebreak (this time of 10 minutes each).
