Anand faces first test at the Corus

As tournaments go, the Corus 2001 chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands, to be played between January 12-28, is as strong as they get.

For the third year running, Garry Kasparov heads the star-cast. This time round, however, the stakes are considerably higher -- for joining him in the field are the likes of FIDE world champion Vishwanathan Anand, and Vladimir Kramnik who, last year, defeated Kasparov in an unofficial title bout between the two players.

This, thus, will be the first time in over a decade that Kasparov goes into a world class tournament without the tag of world champion -- official or unofficial.

Similarly, this is Anand's first outing after winning the world title -- it goes without saying therefore that he becomes the man to beat for the elite field, most especially for Kasparov and Kramnik.

For Anand himself, the stakes are even greater -- ever since his win at Teheran, there has been much debate on the legitimacy of his title, given that three of the top players in the world (Kasparov, Kramnik and Karpov) did not play in the tournament. Karpov has, subsequently, acknowledged Anand as the world champion. Kramnik, for his part, hedged his bets when, in his only public statement, he said, "Why can't there be two world champions?" Kasparov alone, of the troika, has maintained silence. Anand, who comes into the tournament ranked below Kasparov and Kramnik, will thus want to go for broke, if only to silence the doubters in the ranks.

There is another anomaly at the Corus this year. Given that the tournament lineup was decided well in advance in order to give the organisers time to contact the players and get their approval, the tournament ranks Anand at number three. However, the Indian ace, who is hot on the trail of becoming only the second human being in the world to earn an ELO rating of 2800+, is ranked behind Kramnik here.

In actual fact, however, Anand, who had a spectacular 2000 -- he won the world blitz title in Poland, the unofficial world rapidplay title at the Frankfurt Giants, the Fide World Cup in Shenyang and the Fide World championship in Tehran -- overtook Kramnik and, by December, had already reached an all-time high ELO rating of 2790. In fact, the February list from FIDE should show him at 2804, once his points from the world title win are added on.

For the record, the latest available ratings as per ELO rankings are: G Kasparov (Rus) 2849; V Anand (Ind) 2790; V Kramnik (Rus) 2772; M Adams (Eng) 2746; P Leko (Hun) 2745; A Morozevich (Rus) 2745; A Shirov (Esp) 2718; V Topalov (Bul) 2718; V Ivanchuk (Ukr) 2717; B Gelfand (Isr) 2712; E Bareev (Rus) 2709; P Svidler (Rus) 2695.

To revert to Corus, the tournament follows the round robin format. 14 top grandmasters will take part in the main tournament, which is ranked Category 19. The first round starts Saturday January 13. Rest days will be on Monday the 15th, Friday the 19th, and Wednesday the 24th.

Simultaneously, 12 players will play the lower part of the tournament, ranked Category 10. The differentiator is ELO rankings -- the top tournament features players with ELO ratings of 2600 and above, while the lower half features players with a rating of 2300 and above.

Here is the full list (country, tournament ranking, and ELO ratings, in brackets):

Tournament A: Garry Kasparov (Russia-1-2849), Vladimir Kramnik (Russia-2-2770), Viswanathan Anand (India-3-2762), Alexander Morozevich (Russia-4-2756), Michael Adams (England-5-2755), Alexey Shirov (Spain-6-2746), Peter Leko (Hungary-7-2743), Vassili Ivanchuk (Ukraine-8-2719), Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria-9-2707), Jeroen Piket (Netherlands-34-2649), Alexey Fedorov (Belarus-37-2646), Loek van Wely (Netherlands-39-2643), Jan Timman (Netherlands-46-2639), Sergey Tiviakov (Netherlands-76-2608).

Tournament B: Michael Gurevich (Belgium-2667), Boris Gulko (US-2643), GM Thomas Luther (Germany-2547), GM Friso Nijboer (Netherlands-2537), GM Dennis de Vreugt (Netherlands-2511), P. Harikrishna (India-2500), IM Teymour Radjabov (Azerbaijan-2476), Karel van der Weide (Netherlands-2467), Manuel Bosboom (Netherlands -2455), Yge Visser (Netherlands-2418), Erik Hoeksema (Netherlands-2409), and Nico Vink (Netherlands-2296; Vink gets in by virtue of being youth champion of the host nation).

The tournament gets its name from sponsors Corus, formed in October 1999 through a merger of British Steel and Koninklijke Hoogovens, headquartered in London and listed on the London, New York and Amsterdam stock exchanges, with a world-wide employee count of around 64,000.