Hastings (England): Grand Master Krishnan Sasikiran will start as top seed in the premier section of the Hastings International Chess Congress 2002 slated to begin on Saturday at Horntye Park Sports Complex.

The 16-year-old Grand Master Pentyala Hari Krishna is the other Indian in the fray and will look forward to end the year on a positive note after having a not-so- encouraging show in the past few months.

The premier section will be a 10-player tournament to be played on all-play-all (round robin) basis. The other players are GM Sergey Karyakin (Ukraine), GM Alexei Barsov (Uzbekistan), GM Luke McShane, GM Keith Arkell and GM Glenn Flear (All England), GM Vitaly Tseshkovsky, WGM Alexandra Kosteniuk (both Russia) and GM Peter Heine Nielsen (Denmark).

In all nine rounds will be played for a total prize pool of 5,300 Pounds (approximately Rs 365,000) with the winners' purse amounting to 2,000 Pounds.

The tournament will be played under classical time control with 40 moves in the first two hours, 20 in the next and, finally, should the games continue beyond that, a half hour sudden death will come in to effect. The average rating of the tournament is quite high at 2,549 ELO points.

Glamour girl Alexandra Kosteniuk and world's youngest Grand Master Sergey Karyakin, who make their maiden appearance in this traditional event, are expected to hog the limelight.

Both Sasikiran and Hari Krishna were joint winners of this event last year along with Barsov and the invitations to play here again were extended to them by virtue of their excellent performance.

Of the three joint winners Hari Krishna's performance rating was best at 2,694 while Barsov and Saikiran finished with 2,691 and 2,686 respectively. While Sasikiran, an employee of ONGC, has had a memorable year so far, Hari Krishna's results have been mixed.

Sasikiran had quite a few excellent performances, winning international open events like, Asian Open at Bikaner and Tan Chin Nam Cup at China and has been in fine fettle right through.

Peeking at 2,670 ELO points, Sasikiran's biggest scalp this year was none other than former World Champion Vishwanathan Anand, whom he defeated in the World Cup at Hyderabad.

His performance at the recently held Olympiad at Bled in Slovenia also was quite satisfactory on the top board though he did miss his chances against World's highest rated player Garry Kasparov of Russia.

PTI