This time there will be no excuses about the tension of the first World Cup. Nor fatigue: Dommaraju Gukesh, 18 years old, well rested for five weeks, debuts as world champion in the eighty-seventh edition of the Tata Steel Festival in Wijk aan Zee (Netherlands), the Roland Garros of chess. He is not there number onethe Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, after his wedding and the scandals of the Rapid and Lightning World Championships in New York. But the Indian will face four other top ten players from today. The spotlight of the B tournament will be very much on Faustino Oro, the amazing 11-year-old Argentine child prodigy.
The challenge is very demanding for Gukesh, 5th in the world. There is no doubt about his enormous talent – without him, he would not have been able to become the youngest world champion in history – but his performance in the World Cup final against the Chinese Liren Ding in Singapore was clearly below his potential. . In Wijk aan Zee he will have to face, in a league of 14 players, the 2nd in the world, the American Fabiano Caruana; 4th, his compatriot Arjun Erigaisi, whose results in 2024 were exciting; 6th, the Uzbek Nodirbek Abdusattórov, somewhat stagnant but always very tough; and the 8th, the Chinese Yi Wei, very fearsome after being released from his university studies, who a few days ago drew with Carlsen in the German League.
The great obstacles for anyone who aspires to win the tournament do not end there. There are four other participants with more than 2,700 Elo points: the also Indian Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, the German Vincent Keymer, the Dutch Anish Giri and the Slovenian (of Russian origin) Vladimir Fedoséyev. And the other five are also capable of making the tournament miserable for anyone: Pentala Harikrishna (India), Jorden van Foreest (Netherlands), Alexéi Sarana (Serbia, of Russian origin), Max Warmerdam (Netherlands) and Leon Mendonca (India) .
Thanks to training with the most powerful current technology and his enormous talent, Oro has probably been the best 10-year-old chess player in history; A month and a half ago he finished 4th in the Argentine Absolute, fighting for gold until the last round. But the normal thing is that in Wijk aan Zee she is very far from the head of the B tournament because she starts twelfth of the fourteen (thirteenth is the Chinese Miaoyi Lu, 15 years old). It is realistic to think that the Turkish Gurel, 17 years old, 4th seed, can fight for the place that entitles him to play in A in 2026. His dazzling career and the brilliance of his game credit him for this.
In addition, a large open tournament and several small ones for different categories will be played until February 2. Like every year, about 1,500 chess players will flood this small town on the North Sea coast, 30 kilometers from Amsterdam. The chess tradition in Wijk aan Zee began in 1938.
