Wijk aan Zee 2012 Starts Saturday
For many years now, and hopefully for many more, January means it's time for the great chess festival in Wijk aan Zee. As usual, the overarching event includes three 16-player round-robin events, featuring above all a super-tournament for the A-group. The B-group is extremely strong as well, and the C-group includes some powerful players as well, but it's the elite A-group that garners the bulk of the attention.
The last two world champions, Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik, aren't playing, but despite the absence of the world's #4 and #3 players, respectively, the top group is immensely strong. The world's #1 and #2 players, Magnus Carlsen and Levon Aronian, are both playing, as are former FIDE champion Veselin Topalov, Sergey Karjakin and Hikaru Nakamura. All five players are past winners of the event, and Nakamura is the defending champion.
Teimour Radjabov is the third seed, Vassily Ivanchuk is playing as well (it's hard to believe he has never won this tournament! [Update: He has won the event, as a couple of readers pointed out. I shouldn't have trusted my source!]), and so are Vugar Gashimov, Gata Kamsky, Fabiano Caruana, David Navara and Loek van Wely. Finally, two other players are worth singling out in a special way: Boris Gelfand is only the ninth seed, but as he will face Anand for the world championship in a few months his participation is noteworthy. It will be interesting to see what kind of form he's in and how much of his preparation he (seems to) be hiding. [And a second update: Though no one wrote in on this one, Gelfand is also a former winner - he was co-champ way back in 1992.] Finally, the third-to-last seed and second Dutch representative, Anish Giri, just won Reggio Emilia, so he won't be a stealth participant this time around!
In the B-group there aren't any 2700s, but several players are close and/or have broken that barrier before. The top seeds are Lazaro Bruzon, Vladimir Potkin, Alexander Motylev, Sergey Tiviakov and Pentala Harikrishna. Dutch legend and former A-group regular Jan Timman is playing, and although he's not the player he was he's still a strong and interesting competitor. Also worth noticing is Ukranian prodigy Ilya Nyzhnyk, though his progress this past year hasn't been as dramatic as in years past.
In the C-group there are two fairly clear favorites: the second seeded Maxim Turov and above all the slowly unretiring Matthew Sadler, whose recent good results have put him back into the world's top 100. If his unretirement had started a bit sooner he probably would have received an invite to the B-group, but it will be nice to see him in action either way. (Speaking of Sadler, here's a long interview that's worth reading.)
Play starts Saturday. Predictions, readers?