Surya Ganguly looking to
improve his game

The newest entrant to the country's elite Grandmasters' pool, Surya Shekhar Ganguly feels that the third and final GM norm has taken the pressure off him and he can now concentrate on improving his game further.

"The pressure is not there now. I don't have to score two points out of three or 1.5 out of two," Ganguly said on return from the Chess Olympiad in Bled, Slovenia, in the early hours on Tuesday.

"I can now just concentrate on improving my game," said Ganguly, who achieved his final norm at the Olympiad last week.

His immediate aim, Ganguly said, would be to raise his Elo rating to 2600.

The Kolkata-based player admitted he was bogged down a little by the fact that he had been unable to deliver the goods in the past couple of international tournaments where he "missed the norm by just a marginal difference".

"This time around though everything worked just fine for me.

"Right from the beginning I had this foresight of completing the norm and I knew that it in turn would bolster the team's performance," he said.

On the overall men's team performance, which saw it finish a distant 29th at the Olympiad, Ganguly said, "Personally I am happy, but I guess we could have done better."