Tata Steel 2016 is one of the strongest tournaments in January 2016. The Masters bracket of the tournament features 14 of the most renowned chess players today. Each day before the tournament, Chessdom will bring you a pretournament summary for one of the 14 participating Grandmasters.
Magnus Carlsen / Fabiano Caruana / Anish Giri / Liren Ding / Wesley So / Sergey Karjakin / Pavel Eljanov / Shakhryar Mamedyarov / Evgeny Tomashevsky / Michael Adams / David Navara / Yi Wei / Yifan Hou / Loek van Wely
From today Chessdom.com will bring you previews of all participants of the event. Tata Steel 2016 live page is also ready for you.
We begin with the the top seeded player in the Tata Steel Masters 2016, GM Magnus Carlsen, and with good reason. Currently, he is the highest rated player in the world (2834). Carlsen is going into 2016 with a strong track record, hot off his win in the London Chess Classic 2015 and becoming the overall winner of the Grand Chess Tour. Also, he is now participating in the 2015 Qatar Open, his first open this decade.
In the history of Tata Steel Chess Masters series, Carlsen already has 4 titles under his belt. He is currently holding the 2015 Tata Steel Champion title, as well as titles in 2013, 2010 and a joint win with Levon Aronian in 2008. His 4 titles put him at second place for overall wins, tied with 4 other GMs, but just short of the top spot. He is hot on the heels of Vishy Anand who holds the most titles at 5.
Carlsen has played in significantly less games than a lot of the top all-time participants in Corus/Tata Steel – 104 total over 8 tournaments, just a third of Johannes Donner’s all-time high of 298. Carlsen has won 34 of those, leaving him with one of the highest win percentages of all time in the tournament relative to the number of games played.
Carlsen is ready for a win at Tata Steel; he is backed by strong statistics and a strong desire to win, combined with great recent performance. However, the tournament is far from settled and there is no shortage of strong competition for him and exciting matches for every chess enthusiast!
Corus/Tata Steel Participation
| Tournaments (8) | Final ranking |
| Corus 2007 | 13 |
| Corus 2008 | 1 |
| Corus 2009 | 5 |
| Corus 2010 | 1 |
| Tata Steel Chess 2011 | 3 |
| Tata Steel Chess 2012 | 2 |
| Tata Steel Chess 2013 | 1 |
| Tata Steel Chess 2015 | 1 |
