Das, winner of an international tournament at Aurangabad recently, lost to Gujarat's Nirav Rajsubha in 31 moves. Hegde had a long-drawn battle with Syed Anwar Shazuli and lost in 73 moves, while Mishra was beaten in 45 moves by Nisha Mohota.

There were other surprise results -- Ramkrishna Kashelkar defeating GB Joshi, Sudhakar Babu being held for the second successive day, by Rajesh Bahadur. Bahadur drew with Sandeepan Chanda yesterday.

Nirav Rajsuba sacrificed a knight on the 16th move to open Neelotpal Das' King side after a Bishop's opening. Rajsuba then pushed his rook and knight into Das' territory and won his queen for a rook and bishop. In the endgame, Rajsuba had his queen and two pawns to Das' rook and bishop.

The Mishra-Nisha battle began with a irregular opening. Nisha equalised the position bythe 13th move. On the 28th move Mishra moved his knight to d6 and made a positional mistake. Though both Mishra and Nisha were equal on material, Nisha's queen and knight were much more forceful and made inroads quicker than Mishra. In the endgame, Nisha's `h' pawn was queening when Mishra resigned, after 45 moves.

Shazuli, who won against Hegde, faced the Benoni defence. By the 10th move he had won two pawns, on d6 and c5. Having gained control of the board, he went on to conduct the endgame well to win after 73 moves.

Kashelkar defeated GB Joshi when the latter blundered a piece in the endgame. Sajandas Joshi was held to a draw by S Vijayalakshmi, despite being a whole knight up. He, however, faced time pressure and kept misplaying his moves to let the National women's A champion squeeze out a draw after 40 moves.

RESULTS

2nd Round: RB Ramesh 2 bt A Vohra 1; Ponnuswamy Konguvel 2 bt Swati Ghate 1; Nirav Rajsubha 2 bt Neelotpal Das 1; TV Karthikeyan 1 lost to Lanka Ravi 2; Atanu Lahiri 2 btDilip Pagay 1; Syed Anwar Shazuli 2 bt Ravi Hegde 1; K Murugan 2 bt N Neelakanthan 1; P Mitrakant 1.5 drew with Pritam Singh 1.5; YP Srivastava 1 lost to Shankar Roy 2; Pradip Ghosh 1 lost to Verghese Koshy 2; Neeraj Kumar Mishra 1 lost to Nisha Mohota 2; Ch Keshavananda K 1 lost to Suvrajit Saha 2; Anup Deshmukh 2 bt Rupesh Kant 1; Vishal Sareen 2 bt CJ Arvind 1; Prathamesh Mokal 1 lost to Sharad Tilak 2; Surya Shekar Ganguly 2 bt Ebenezer Joseph 1; TS Ravi 2 bt MR Venkatesh 1; Ramkrishna Kashelkar 2 bt GB Joshi 1; Rajesh Bahadur 1 drew with NS Babu 1.