Wesley ranks 4th in tough Tata Steel chess

MANILA, Philippines - Grandmaster Wesley So starts his campaign to close in on reigning world chess champion GM Magnus Carlsen of Norway as he joins the super-strong Tata Steel Masters 2016 unfolding on Saturday in Wijk aan Zee, The Netherlands.

So will be seeded fourth among 13 participants after he ended 2015 ranked 10th in the FIDE rating list with 2773 and should be one of the favorites to challenge Carlsen, a three-time champion in this annual closed GM tournament considered the Wimbledon of chess, for the crown.

Last year, So tied for second to fifth places with GMs Maxime Vachier-Lagrave of France, Anish Giri of The Netherlands and Ding Liren of China and half a point behind eventual winner Carlsen and is expected to go all out for a breakthrough win in this Category 20 (2748) event.

Carlsen, the highest ranked chesser in the world with a 2878 rating, remains the favorite the win in this same tournament he topped last year, 2013, 2010 and shared first with Armenian GM Levon Aronian in 2008.

Aside from Carlsen, the other players ranked higher than So in this tournament are Giri (2798) and GM Fabiano Caruana (2787), who also decided to represent the United States like So.

The other participants are Russians Sergey Karjakin and Evgeny Tomashevsky, Chinese Ding Liren and Wei Yi, Ukrainian Pavel Eljanov, Azeri Shakhryar Mamedyarov, English Michael Adams, Czech David Navara, Dutch Loek Van Wely and reigning women’s world champion Hou Yifan of China.

So was coming off a disappointing 18th place finish in the 2015 Qatar Masters Open in Doha, Qatar last December that capped his up-and-down 2015 campaign.

Interestingly, Carlsen topped the event by crushing China’s Yu Yangyi in the two-game blitz tiebreaker.