The Tata Steel Chess Tournament, one of the most prestigious events in the international chess calendar and often referred as the “Wimbledon of Chess” starts today, with a very strong line-up.
The tournament traditionally takes place in the coastal village of Wijk aan Zee, North Holland. Since 2014 there are also two Tata Steel Chess On Tour events at other exciting locations in the Netherlands.
The event has two main player groups – the Tata Steel Masters and the Tata Steel Challengers, each with 14 players.
Masters tournament 2017 is of 21st category, with average rating 2753. The tournament features five players from top 10 (December 2016 list): World Champion and World #1 Magnus Carlsen (Norway), World #5 Wesley So (USA), World #Sergey Karjakin (Russia), World #7 Levon Aronian (Armenia) and World #10 Anish Giri (Netherlands).
Aditionally, World #11 Harikrishna Pentala (India), World #13 Ian Nepomniachtchi (Russia), World #14 Pavel Eljanov (Ukraine), World #18 Radoslaw Wojtaszek (Poland), World #22 Dmitry Andreikin (Russia), World #30 Richard Rapport (Hungary), World #38 Wei Yi (China), World #44 Loek Van Welly (Netherlands) and World #86 Adhiban Baskaran will participate in the 2017 edition of Tata Steel Chess.
The 1st round pairings of the Masters event are:
Harikrishna vs Aronian
Adhiban vs Van Wely
Eljanov vs Rapport
Karjakin vs Giri
So vs Carlsen
Wojtaszek vs Nepomniachtchi
Andreikin vs Wei
Tata Steel Masters full pairings
The first seed of the Tata Steel Challengers tournament is GM Markus Ragger (Austria), who is playing for the first time in Wijk aan Zee. There are three Dutch representatives in the B-group – Jorden van Foreest, Erwin l’Ami and Benjamin Bok, as well as three experienced tournament players Ilia Smirin (Israel), Gawain Jones (England) and VladimirDobrov (Russia).
It will be interesting to see how the world best ranked girl WGM Lei Tingjie (China) and the young talent from the USA Jeffery Xiong will show themselves, as well as who will win the tournament and qualify for the A-group in the Tata Steel tournament 2018.