The Indian chess team suffered a major setback as they were relegated to the silver medal in Classical Chess at the second Asian Indoor Games here.

The Indians, who had made a clean sweep of all three gold medals in Rapid chess last week, were also pushed out the race for individual medals in the men's section.

The Indian chess team lost a crucial fourth round clash to China, as a result of which they were trying only to catch up. They beat Qatar 3-1 but were held to a 2-2 draw by Vietnam.

India finished their six rounds with four wins, a draw and a loss, while China had five wins and a draw against Vietnam. Vietnam took the bronze with three wins, two draws and a loss.

India beat Jordan, the Philippines and Indonesia 3.5-0.5 in the first three matches for a great start, but then suffered a big shock as China avenged the defeat in Rapid format with a 3-1 win in Classical.

Bu Xianghi beat K. Sasikiran, Ni Hua downed Surya Sekhar Ganguly and Hou Yi Fan defeated Dronavalli Harika. The only point for India came from Koneru Humpy, who beat former World Cup champion Xu Yuhua.

India was on the back foot thereafter.

India's best performer as far as individual scores go was Harika, the gold medallist in Rapid. She grabbed five points out of a possible six and qualified for the women's semi-finals, ahead of Humpy, who had 4.5 points.

Both Sasikiran and Ganguly failed to make the last four with 3.5 points.

Humpy's loss to Chinese-born Qatar player Zhu Chen in fifth round proved costly as she found herself out of the last four in the race for individual medals.

The top four players in terms of points in the team competition advance to the semi-finals for individual medals.

Source: sports.indiatimes.com