INQUIRER Sports

GRANDMASTER DARWIN LAYLO followed up his third straight win with a fighting draw against the tournament?s top seed Saturday night to keep his share of the lead four rounds through the $30,000 Prospero Pichay Cup international chess championship at the LWUA Building in Quezon City.

Laylo, the reigning Asian Zonal champion from Lipa City, topped IM Richard Bitoon in the third round and then drew with top-ranked GM Mikhail Mchedlish-vili to forge a three-way tie for the lead with the Georgian and Iranian GM Ehsan Ghaemmaghami with 3.5 points.

Mchedlishvili bested Chinese GM Li Shilong in the third round while the sixth-ranked Ghaemmaghami strung up wins over Tirto of Indonesia in the third and No. 15 GM John Paul Gomez in the next.

GM Anton Filippov of Uzbekistan, the newly crowned President Macapagal-Arroyo Cup winner, and Filipino GMs Rogelio Antonio Jr. and Eugene Torre and Bitoon shared fourth spot with eight others with 3.0 points each.

Filippov drew back-to-back with GM Mark Paragua and Antonio.

Out to bounce back from his disappointing form in last week?s PGMA Cup, Torre downed Ali Branzuela and GM-elect Ronald Dableo, while Bitoon bounced back from his third-round defeat to Laylo to whip upstart Denil Causo.

Antonio, who will join Laylo and GM Wesley So as the country?s representatives to the World Cup in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, next month, trounced IM Rolando Nolte in the third round.

The other 3-pointers were GMs Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son and Dao Thien Hai of Vietnam, Tigran Kotanjian of Armenia, Abhijeet Gupta and Das Neelotpal of India, Zhang Zhong of Singapore, Merab Gagunashvili and Pyotr Kostenko of Kazakhstan.

Zhang bested Paragua in the fourth round.