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Tata Steel Chess 2025: 7 Talking Points

Tata Steel Chess 2025: 7 Talking Points

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Colin_McGourty
Staff
| 56 | Chess Event Coverage

GM Gukesh Dommaraju will play his first official game as world champion against GM Anish Giri on Saturday as the 2025 Tata Steel Chess Masters begins. Half of the top-10 are in action, with Gukesh joined by GMs Fabiano Caruana, Arjun Erigaisi, Nodirbek Abusattorov, and defending champion Wei Yi, while the Challengers will showcase young talent, including 11-year-old IM Faustino Oro and 14-year-old IM Lu Miaoyi. Let’s take a look at some talking points.    

  1. How Will Gukesh Perform In His First Event As World Champion?
  2. Can Wei Yi Defend His Title?
  3. Will It Be Another Indian Year?
  4. Will Oro, Gurel, Lu, Or Another Prodigy Shine In The Challengers?
  5. Will The Tweaked FIDE Circuit See A Bigger Fight?
  6. Who’s Missing?
  7. For Some Players It's Also A Warmup For Freestyle Chess

How Will Gukesh Perform In His First Event As World Champion?

Gukesh finished in a four-way tie for first place in the 2024 Tata Steel Chess Masters, and although he lost out in the playoff he would go on to have a dream year—winning the 2024 FIDE Candidates Tournament, top-performing as India won the 45th FIDE Chess Olympiad, and finally clinching the world championship title by beating GM Ding Liren in the 2024 FIDE World Championship in Singapore at the age of just 18.

Outrageous success brings its own challenges, with Gukesh suddenly in high demand. He found time to make an ad with India’s previous World Champion Viswanathan Anand (see more details)…

…and has been showered with money and awards. The latest came today, as he received the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award, the highest sporting honor in India.

Chennai is a world and almost 8,000 kilometers away from the small Dutch coastal village of Wijk aan Zee where the chess will take place, so Gukesh will be arriving only hours before his first game. Here are the Masters pairings for Saturday's round one, which starts at 8 a.m. ET/14:00 CET/6:30 p.m. IST.

Will jet lag be a factor? Perhaps, but Dutch number-one GM Anish Giri has watched enough of the press conferences from Singapore to expect nothing less than a Gukesh at the top of his game. 

Can Wei Yi Defend His Title?

The surprise winner in 2024 was China's Wei Yi, who has become a fixture in the top 10 and begun to live up to some of the immense promise he showed when he crossed 2700 at the age of 15. He warmed up for Wijk by visiting Hamburg a week earlier, where he beat GM Velimir Ivic and made a draw against GM Magnus Carlsen in their Bundesliga clash to move above GM Ian Nepomniachtchi to world number-eight on the live rating list.

Retaining the title is not going to be easy, however, with a formidable 14-player lineup for the 87th edition of Tata Steel Chess.

No player in the lineup has won the event twice, but apart from Wei, three players have also won it once: Caruana (2020), GM Jorden van Foreest (2021), and Giri (2023).   

Who will be next to have their name carved in steel?

Will It Be Another Indian Year?

The world championship title and double gold at the Olympiad made 2024 a stunning year for Indian chess, but with the young stars only improving, there's every chance this is just the beginning. After three Indian players taking part in the Masters in 2023, there are no fewer than five this year, with only hosts the Netherlands (three) coming anywhere close to that representation. 

2025 should be the year when GM Arjun Erigaisi finally gets invitations to most of the top events, rather than having to travel from open to open, and he starts it as world number-four. He's a win away from overtaking GMs Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura, though Arjun has mixed memories of Wijk. In 2022 he qualified for the Masters with a stunning 10.5/13 in the Challengers, but then in the 2023 Masters he finished last with no wins and five losses.

GM Pentala Harikrishna, fresh from helping Gukesh win the title and a late replacement for GM Vidit Gujrathi, is playing Wijk for the fifth time, while GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu will be looking to put what, by his standards, was a mediocre 2024 behind him and begin climbing again. 18-year-old GM Leon Luke Mendonca, meanwhile, faces the daunting task of playing his first super-tournament after winning the 2023 Challengers. 

That's not all, as the Indian women's numbers two and four, IM Divya Deshmukh and GM Vaishali Rameshbabu, will be playing in the Challengers.

It's Divya-Yakubboev and Oro-Vaishali in Round 1 of the Challengers.

Anand, a five-time champion in Wijk aan Zee, could easily have held his Breakfast Blitz in the Netherlands instead of Chennai! 

Will Oro, Gurel, Lu, Or Another Prodigy Shine In The Challengers?

The 14 places in the Challengers provide a perfect opportunity to invite female players and prodigies, and once again Tata Steel Chess has taken full advantage.

Although 23-year-old Czech GM Thai Dai Van Nguyen is the top seed, with GMs Nodirbek Yakubboev (22) and Frederik Svane (20) close behind on rating (those latter two will both celebrate birthdays in Wijk!), much of the focus will be on the even younger players. We have two world junior champions, Divya and GM Kazybek Nogerbek, while there's no one in the world younger and higher-rated than 16-year-old 2624-rated Ediz Gurel from Turkey.

14-year-old Lu Miaoyi is one of the great hopes of Chinese chess and is already the second-highest rated girl under the age of 20, but the player who could easily steal the show is Oro, now 11, who at the age of 10 became the youngest-ever international master. It's going to be a baptism of fire for the Argentine wunderkind, but his career to date suggests he can handle it. In his last classical event, the 2024 Argentine Championship, he drew against four grandmasters on the way to finishing fourth.


A GM norm will be one of his ambitions for the event, as it will be for Divya and Lu, while the winner will qualify for the 2026 Masters. 

Will The Tweaked FIDE Circuit See A Bigger Fight?

"If people aren't trying, how can you say it's a good system?" said Caruana on his podcast after winning the 2024 FIDE Circuit to become the first qualifier for the 2026 FIDE Candidates Tournament. His point was that only he, Arjun, and Abdusattorov actually posted the maximum seven eligible results. Issues with the FIDE Circuit had surfaced early in 2024, with Giri highlighting the points scored in Wijk.

Mendonca, who won clear first in the Challengers, earned more points than the three players who tied for first in the Masters—a far tougher task—but lost in the playoff.

The FIDE Circuit standings after Tata Steel Chess 2024. Image: FIDE.

It's noteworthy that even with the same rules this year that wouldn't be repeated, since the Challengers is weaker, but FIDE has moved to fix the main cause of the anomaly. It was largely down to a rule that only the top-three players in a round-robin would score points, a change from the 50% (i.e. seven for Tata Steel Chess) in 2023, so that a four-way tie watered down the points available. That's been changed in 2025 by giving points to the top-five places.

Arjun had to settle for 5th place in the World Rapid Championship and couldn't overtake Caruana in the Circuit race, but he has another chance in 2025. Photo: Maria Emelianova/Chess.com.

The maximum points available this year are 28.95 for sole first in the Masters, and 13.05 for sole first in the Challengers, but Tata Steel Chess won't produce a leader in the race for the 2026 Candidates spot, since that goes to Ding, who picked up 40.64 points (doubled from 20.32, according to the 2024 rules) for finishing runner-up in the world championship match. In a post-match interview, Ding told FM Mike Klein that he was unlikely to play the required tournaments to qualify via the Circuit, but it's possible the healthy headstart will make him reconsider. 

Who’s Missing? 

Tata Steel Chess has a big field, but there are always players missing. Top of that list is eight-time winner and 16-time participant (in the top group alone) Carlsen, who skips the tournament for a second year in a row. That's likely down both to his recent marriage and a reluctance to play 13 rounds of classical chess at a long time control.

Nakamura is also absent, but that's no surprise as the 2011 winner hasn't played the event in over a decade, while no details are known about the absence of GM Alireza Firouzja, who finished fifth in 2024. One player who did explain his absence is GM Ian Nepomniachtchi, who finished 8th in 2024 and revealed during the Freestyle Chess qualifier that he simply hadn't been invited back.

GM Hans Niemann, who finished seventh in the 2024 Challengers but has since risen to world number-18, was the most vocal about not being invited to play. 

For Some Players It’s Also A Warmup For Freestyle Chess

Another potential reason for Carlsen not playing is that he wants to prepare, or preserve energy, for the Weissenhaus Freestyle Chess Grand Slam. That starts on February 7, just five days after Wijk ends, and will be the start of a lucrative five-tournament tour that after Germany moves to Paris (France), New York (U.S.), Delhi (India), and Cape Town (South Africa).

On the other hand, half of the Weissenhaus field will also play in Wijk: Caruana, Gukesh, Abdussatorov, GM Vincent Keymer, and qualifier GM Vladimir Fedoseev. There's not going to be much time to catch our breath!   

The broadcast, with GM David Howell and IM Jovanka Houska commentating, starts at 8 a.m. ET/14:00 CET/6:30 p.m. IST on Saturday, January 18, on the Chess.com Events page and on the Chess24 Twitch and YouTube Channels.

The 87th edition of Tata Steel Chess takes place January 18-February 2, 2025, in Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands. The time control is 100 minutes for 40 moves followed by 50 minutes to finish each game, with a 30-second increment from move one. Both the Masters and Challengers groups are 14-player round-robin tournaments.

Colin_McGourty
Colin McGourty

Colin McGourty led news at Chess24 from its launch until it merged with Chess.com a decade later. An amateur player, he got into chess writing when he set up the website Chess in Translation after previously studying Slavic languages and literature in St. Andrews, Odesa, Oxford, and Krakow.

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