Gibraltar: Overnight joint leaders Surya Sekhar Ganguly and Sandipan Chanda maintained their lead with convincing wins in the fifth round of the Gibraltar chess meet on Sunday.

Sandipan and Surya both have 4.5 points, followed on four each by top seed Nigel Short, second seed Alexei Dreev and GM P. Harikrishna.

It was a fruitful day for Indians as Tejas Bakre inched closer to his third and final GM norm by defeating GM Chris Ward of England. Swati Ghate sprang a major surprise by beating the highly rated GM Aleksander Polulzahov of Russia.

In Sunday’s games, Surya defeated veteran GM Dibyendu Barua, while Sandipan put it across Russian GM Alexey Kuzmin. Indian GM Abhijit Kunte drew with Ernesto Inarkiev of Russia to move to 3.5 points.

Among other Indian players, Harikrishna beat Murray Chandler, while Bakre defeated Chris Ward. S. Vijayalakshmi drew with Bojan Vuckovic and her sister Meenakshi lost to Peter Wells.