Each January, around this time, the modest town of Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands comes alive, bustling with the finest chess players on the planet. The elite chess players, the might of their generations, and the not-so-elite players, clash separately in the Masters (A) and Challengers (B) editions of the already famous Tata Steel Tournament, formerly known as the Corus and Hoogovens tournaments. The legendary tournament had its beginning in 1938. Over the years, it has attracted a long list of super-grandmasters of chess. Since World War 11, every classical world champion with the exception of Vasily Symslov and Bobby Fischer, played the Tata Steel competition. The winners’ list is impressive. The Masters features 14 of the world’s best chess players in a fierce single round-robin competition.
World champions Magnus Carlsen and Vishy Anand are the only two persons to have won the influential Masters a total of five times. Disappointingly, Anand is not contesting this 2017 edition, but Carlsen is the principal headliner of the prestigious competition. The five exquisite names which are headlining the competition are Carlsen; his challenger for the 2016 world championship chess match, Russia’s Sergey Karjakin; the 2016 Player of the Year, the US’ Wesley So; Armenia’s grandmaster Levon Aronian, numbered in the top ten of the world’s most able players and Anish Giri, the Dutch grandmaster who is also numbered among the world’s top ten.
At the conclusion of the fifth game of the 13-round competition which ends January 29, So has taken the lead with an emphatic victory over India’s Pentala Harikrishna. In the fifth round, bottom seed Baskaran Adhiban, India’s emerging grandmaster, stunned Karjakin in a French defence game lasting 78 moves. Grandmaster Aleksandr Lenderman annotated the game and noted: “… For Game of the Day I decided to choose Adhiban’s win against GM Sergey Karjakin because very rarely do we see a player as strong as Sergey Karjakin lose with White in such a convincing manner, and I also thought the game had theoretical significance.”
At the end of the fifth round the leader board read as follows:
- Wesley So (2808) 4 points
- M Carlsen (2840) 3½ points
- P Eljanov (2755) 3½ points
- L Aronian (2780) 3 points
- A Giri (2773) 2½ points
- P Harikrishna (2766) 2½ points
On the official rest day of the tournament, Carlsen and Dutch chess grandmaster Loek Van Wely captained two football teams in a soccer match comprising other chess players. It was a “pick and play” match as we say in Guyanese parlance. The world champion’s team won the match 6 -2, thereby suggesting that Carlsen is not only good at chess. He scored two of his team’s goals!
