Humpy Grand Konera advanced to the Fide World Cup final after defeating the Chinese Lei Tingjie in a long Tiebreak in Georgia on Thursday and established an All-Indian final with Divy Destymukh. With this result, Humpy and Divya secured places in a tournament for women’s candidates scheduled for next year.
It will be a generation battle in the final of the FID World Cup final Wonder that won their first GM norm Previously, at the tournament, it approached closer to becoming only the fourth female grandmother from the country.
Former World Champion Viswanathan Anand appreciated Humpy’s performance and in the recent past praised the consistency of a veteran in tournaments with large tickets.
“Tiebreak between Humpy Koner and Lei Tingjie ended up in the nerve duel due to huge shares. Humpy managed to build and return to the match after the first failure and then won the last two games they would go through.
“Indian fans can rejoice,” Anand said, emphasizing the immenseness of this opportunity. For the first time, two Indians will compete in the World Women’s World Cup final. The final runs on Saturday after rest.
The courageous Humpy is fighting
Humpy and Lei stretched their two classic games earlier in the week and sent a match to fast tiebreaks. The first Rapid Games set, played with time check after 15 minutes plus 10 seconds of increment, also ended with a heel of 1-1. This led to the second set of games, with 10 minutes to players and the same addition.
In the first of these games, Lei capitalized a mistake in the middle game to get a pawn and transform her advantage into winning in the end game. Despite the presence of the opposite colored bishops, Humpy could not stick to the draw and found that he needed victory to stay in the match.
She responded with folded and efficient performance performance. He plays with white pieces, Humpy accepted Queen’s pawn opening and maintained stable control all the time. Her positioning superiority and technical game Endgame allowed her to balance the score and force another set of blitz tiebreaks.
The third set, played in five minutes plus a three -second addition, saw Humpy’s command. She convincingly won the first game with white pieces, exerted Lei under pressure from opening and constantly building an advantage. In the reverse game, which needed only a draw to advance, Humpy decided to open the Italian opening and gradually tightened its grip on the position. She continued to win the game and sealed her place with 2-0 result in the Blitz phase.
With this victory, Humpy will move to his first World Women’s World Cup. While she held the world’s quick title and was part of several main teams and individual triumphs, the World Championship was one of the few titles that were missing from her CV.
Divya Deshmukh, 18, will be her opponent in the final after defeating the Russian Polina Shuvalov in her own semifinals. (With PTI inputs)
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Published:
Akshay Ramesh
Published on:
July 24, 2025
