Tata Steel 2012

Wijk aan Zee

The first super-GM tournament of the year, featuring Magnus Carlsen, is the traditional Wijk aan Zee event which takes place from the 14th to the 29th of January 2012. This is arguably the strongest ever edition and includes seven from the World's top ten in the featured A-Group.

The policy of the organizers is to invite to some of the World's up-and-coming stars to their three closed tournaments. In contrast, participating this year in Group B, there will be living legend Jan Timman.

The time control is 100' (+30")/40, then 50' (+30")/20, then 15' (+30") KO.

Here are this year's participants:

The A-Group:

Seed	Name	Age	FED	Elo	World rank
1	Magnus Carlsen	21	NOR	2835	1
2	Levon Aronian	29	ARM	2805	2
3	Teimour Radjabov	24	AZE	2773	5
4	Veselin Topalov	36	BUL	2770	6
5	Sergey Karjakin	22	RUS	2769	7
6	Vassily Ivanchuk	42	UKR	2766	8
7	Vugar Gashimov	25	AZE	2761	10
8	Hikaru Nakamura	24	USA	2759	12
9	Boris Gelfand	43	ISR	2739	16
10	Fabiano Caruana	19	ITA	2736	17
11	Gata Kamsky	37	USA	2732	20
12	Anish Giri	17	NED	2714	28
13	David Navara	26	CZE	2712	30
14	Loek Van Wely	39	NED	2692	54

The participation of veteran Jan Timman in the B-Group will be a boon for Dutch chess fans:

Rk	Name	Age	FED	Elo	World rank
1	Lazaro Bruzon Batista	29	CUB	2691	55
2	Vladimir Potkin	29	RUS	2684	65
3	Sergei Tiviakov	38	NED	2677	70
4	Alexander Motylev	32	RUS	2677	72
5	Pentala Harikrishna	25	IND	2665	82
6	Sipke Ernst	33	NED