Utut succumbs to Hickl in local chess tourney

JAKARTA (JP): Utut Adianto stumbled on the 25th move and fell seven steps later to Joerg Hickl, the German grandmaster who knows him inside out, in the Gunadarma International Grandmaster Chess Tournament's fourth round here yesterday.

The Indonesian grandmaster, who tried to offset his disadvantage of playing with the black pieces with an English defense, started the game with a series of bold attacks in order to break Hickl's defense.

Hickl, who shared the BNI International Chess Tournament title with Utut here in July, soon spotted a weakness in Utut's aggressiveness and maneuvered a knight to weaken Utut's king-side defense.

To make things worse, Utut blundered on the 25th move. Hickl capitalized on the error by capturing Utut's f6 knight with a rook and thus destroying Utut's king-side defense.

It was Utut's first loss, coming after three successive draws.

In other matches, international master Ruben Gunawan of Indonesia also fell on the 32nd move, to Ivan Sokolov of Bosnia- Herzegovina. Until the 16th move, Ruben was able to hold Sokolov, whose elo rating of 2,670 is the highest in the tournament.

A step later Sokolov made an excellent pawn move which paved the way for him to take control of the open c file.

But on the 28th move, it became obvious Ruben's days were numbered. Sokolov, who formed a Queen's Indian defense to counter Ruben's advantage of playing with the white pieces, imprisoned Ruben's c3 knight with his c8 queen. On the 31st move, Sokolov put Ruben between Scylla and Charybdis as he offered his c3 queen to Ruben, who could not capture it because that would result in a checkmate. On the 32nd move, Ruben raised the white flag.

The other result of the day was that Michal Krasenkow of Poland drew with Eugenio Torre of the Philippines after 24 moves. (arf)