The 2019 Tata Steel Tournament ("Wijk aan Zee") Starts Saturday
That's tomorrow for those of you in the U.S. of A., though not for long, and it's already today for most of the world. More precisely, the games (or at least the broadcast) of the 2019 Tata Steel Chess Tournament begin at 1:30 p.m. local time in the Netherlands, or 7:30 a.m. ET in the U.S.
It's very strong, as always, with three 2800s and three world champions in action. (Those categories only overlap with one person.) Only two of the 14 players are rated below 2700, and one of them was over 2700 for most of 2018 and is at 2695 right now. Here are the pairings, which start off with a bang as #3 takes on #1 right from the get-go:
- Ding Liren (2813) - Magnus Carlsen (2835)
- Santosh Vidit Gujrathi (2695) - Jan-Krzysztof Duda (2738)
- Jorden Van Foreest (2612) - Viswanathan Anand (2773)
- Vladislav Fedoseev (2724) - Richard Rapport (2731)
- Sam Shankland (2725) - Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (2817)
- Teimour Radjabov (2757) - Vladimir Kramnik (2777)
- Anish Giri (2783) - Ian Nepomniachtchi (2763)
There is also a Challengers group, also with 14 players, whose ratings range from a high of 2699 down to 2470. The top seeds are Anton Korobov (2699), Vladislav Kovalev (2687), World Junior champion Parham Maghsoodloo (2679), former super-elite player and Candidate Evgeny Bareev (2650), and a bit further down the title young super-talents Andrey Esipenko (2584), Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa (2539), and Vincent Keymer (2500) are also in the mix.
Predictions? I'll make one: the overall percentage of draws will not be particularly high. A second prediction is that everyone will forget about the low percentage of draws the next time a draw-heavy event occurs, and will call for various changes (shorter time controls, Chess960, dueling with pistols at 10 paces at dawn, etc.) to "fix" the game. (Meanwhile, in TCEC land, engines which produce far stronger chess than the best humans still produce a pretty fair number of decisive games against each other, so things still aren't as bad as the doomsayers think.)
As for predicting a winner, I'll pass, but I'm rooting for Sam Shankland to win and for Carlsen to lose eight or more rating points during the event. That would put him behind Fabiano Caruana, but I wouldn't mind if Mamedyarov or Ding leapfrogged them both to take first place on the list. It would be good to see someone ahead of Carlsen, both for the sake of variety and to hopefully motivate Carlsen to do what's necessary to become the player he was 4-5 years ago.