Chennai Grand Masters 2025: Erigaisi secures facile victory in opening round; Nihal Sarin falls against Keymer

Top seed Arjun Erigaisi cruised to an easy win against the USA’s Awonder Liang in the opening round of the Chennai Grand Masters 2025 here on Thursday.

Playing with white pieces, World No. 6 Erigaisi established an early advantage before chipping away at his opponent’s defence consistently.

Erigaisi’s high-accuracy chess eventually got to Liang as he made back-to-back errors in the middle game, before resigning after his 49th move.

Despite securing a comfortable win, the 21-year-old suggested that he could have found better moves.

“It’s nice to start with a win. But of course, the start doesn’t necessarily mean much because I had started well in my previous Classical tournament, but I didn’t finish well. I believe somewhere I did make some inaccuracies, like especially this Bishop to g3 move.

“I think there was something better than that, I wasn’t sure what exactly it was, but I was fairly confident there should be something better than that, but I just couldn’t find,” said Erigaisi.

The 20-year-old Victor Keymer (L) held the upper hand for vast swathes of the game with white pieces against Nihal Sarin.
| Photo Credit:
RAGU R/The Hindu

The most exciting match of the first round, though, was the one between Germany’s Vincent Keymer and India’s Nihal Sarin, which was also the only other main-draw game with a decisive result.

The 20-year-old Keymer held the upper hand for vast swathes of the game with white pieces before it headed into a time scramble, where Nihal regained some ground.

But Keymer’s rook advantage proved to be too big a chasm for Nihal to overcome as he resigned after move 51. The German grandmaster was a relieved man after securing a nervy win.

“I think I was winning kind of completely, and then I messed it up even though I had like 20 minutes against zero. I just thought that what I was doing was winning and then suddenly one forcing line didn’t work out the way I wanted [it] to. I thought it’s best not to get too low on time to not mess it up. But I messed it up exactly by not taking one more move of him,” said Keymer.

The drawn encounter between India’s Vidit Gujrathi and Dutch GM Jorden van Foreest also witnessed some pitched battle, with the advantage swinging wildly between the two.

Gujrathi was on the back foot for most part before an error in judgement from van Foreest brought the game back into balance before the two decided to shake hands.

The Challengers segment, an all-Indian affair, had three decisive results. While M Pranesh bettered Aryan Chopra, Leon Luke Mendonca beat Harshavardhan G B, with both players winning with white pieces.

The only win of the day with black pieces came through Diptayan Ghosh, who outplayed D Harika.