Tata Steel Chess Tournament 2013

     The Tata Steel Chess Tournament starts today in Wijk aan Zee. It will be 2 weeks of exciting chess, I can't  wait to follow it! There are 14 players in the A group, with Magnus Carlsen as the top-seed.  Here's the list of participants:

Garry Kasparov awarding Alexandra with the Gold Medal

GM	Carlsen, Magnus	NOR	2861
GM	Aronian, Levon	ARM	2802
GM	Caruana, Fabiano	ITA	2781
GM	Karjakin, Sergey	RUS	2780
GM	Anand, Viswanathan	IND	2772
GM	Nakamura, Hikaru	USA	2769
GM	Wang, Hao	CHN	2752
GM	Leko, Peter	HUN	2735
GM	Giri, Anish	NED	2720
GM	Harikrishna, Pentala	IND	2698
GM	van Wely, Loek	NED	2679
GM	Sokolov, Ivan	NED	2663
GM	L'Ami, Erwin	NED	2627
GM	Hou, Yifan	CHN	2603

     The average rating of the tournament is 2732, which makes it a 20 category one. As a premier, we can see Hou Yifan, the former Women's World Champion playing in the A group.
     Another ineteresting player to follow is the 14 yo Alexandra Goryachkina who's the G18 World Champion and who already has an impressive 2402 Elo. She plays in the C group of the festival.
     The World Junior Champion- Ipatov Alexander (2587) participates in the B group of the event.
     It is very cool to see so many talented juniors being given the opportunity to play in such strong tournaments,I hope to be able to play there some
day too :)

Typical view of Wijk an Zee when winter 

     I hope we will see some amazing chess, and I will definetely free my tomorrow's afternoon in order to follow the Aronian-Carlsen encounter!