The World Cup in Khanty-Mansiysk is featuring its usual mix of crazy errors and upsets. The first round saw five qualifiers from the Indian contingent of Pentala Harikrishna, Vidit Gujrathi, Surya Shekhar Ganguly, Baskaran Adhiban, S P Sethuraman, S L Narayanan, Abhijeet Gupta, Chithambaram Aravindh, Nihal Sarin and Karthikeyan Murali.
The trio of Harikrishna, Gujrathi and Adhiban were all higher rated than their respective opponents and qualified smoothly for round two, winning their matches without tiebreaks. Youngster Sarin beat the much higher-rated Jorge Cori convincingly in the classicals. The 20-year-old Chithambaram Aravindh pulled off a much bigger upset, beating Michael Adams