Maintaining his unbeaten run, Abhijeet Gupta cleared a major hurdle by getting past third seed and National champion Aravindh Chithambaram and emerged as the leader after four rounds of the Commonwealth chess championship on Tuesday.

Once Abhijeet won this battle of overnight leaders in rook-and-pawn ending lasting 60 moves, Debashis Das stopped M.S. Thej Kumar, the other joint leader, in 50 moves. As a result, Abhijeet opened a half-point lead over three players — Debashis. R.R. Laxman and P. Saravana Krishna.

Laxman got the better of R. Vaishali and Krishna upstaged defending champion P. Karthikeyan.

Second seed S. L. Narayanan (3) continued his recovery following an early loss by beating L.R. Srihari.

Tania holds Swapnil

Tania Sachdev, the women defending champion, punched over her weight to hold Grandmaster Swapnil Dhopade, while women’s top seed Divya Deshmukh tamed Kiran Manisha Mohanty.

The results (fourth round): Abhijeet Gupta (4) bt Aravindh Chithambaram (3); M.S. Thej Kumar (3) lost to Debashis Das (2.5); Arjun Erigaisi (3) drew with P. Shyaamnikhil (3); Tania Sachdev (3) drew with Swapnil Dhopade (3); C. R. G. Krishan (3) drew with Ajay Karthikeyan (3); K. Ratnakaran (3) drew with Abhijit Kunte (3); P. Saravana Krishna (3.5) bt P. Karthikeyan (2.5); R. R. Laxman (3.5) bt R. Vaishali (2.5); L. R. Srihari (2.5) lost to S. L. Narayanan (3); Nisha Mohota (2) lost to M.R. Lalit Babu (3); J. Deepan Chakkaravarthy (3) bt V. Varshini (2).