Very cool event

‘Rising Stars’ versus ‘Experience’

The NH Chess Tournament is a confrontation between a team of five young ‘Rising Stars’ and a team of five ‘Experienced’ grandmasters who can look back on impressive and glorious careers. They play a ‘Scheveningen’ tournament, which means that each player of one team plays against each of the players of the other team. They do so twice, once with the white pieces and once with the black pieces.The team that collects most points wins the tournament. However, there are additional prizes for individual results, which are specified in the tournament rules.

The ‘Experience’ team consists of (next to their country their current Elo rating is given):

1 Ulf Andersson (Sweden, 2542)
2 Alexander Beliavsky (Slovenia, 2625)
3 Artur Jussupow (Germany, 2617)
4 Ljubomir Ljubojevic (Serbia, 2551)
5 John Nunn (England, 2617)

And these are the ‘Rising Stars’:

1 Magnus Carlsen (Noorway, 2675)
2 Sergey Karjakin (Ukraine, 2679)
3 Jan Smeets (The Netherlands, 2532)
4 Daniel Stellwagen (The Netherlands, 2575)
5 Wang Hao (China, 2610)

The players of the ‘Rising Stars’ team could invite a trainer to help them during the tournament. Family members were excluded.

The seconds of the ‘Rising Stars’ are (in the same order):

1 Peter Heine Nielsen (Denmark, 2640)
2 Ruslan Ponomariov (Ukraine, 2721)
3 Arkadij Naiditsch (Germany, 2664)
4 Yasser Seirawan (United States, 2638)
5 Li Wenliang (China, 2443)

Venue

The NH Chess tournament is held at:
NH Grand Hotel KrasnapolskyDam 91012 JS Amsterdam
NH Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky is situated on Dam Square opposite the Dam Palace. From Amsterdam Central Station it’s a five to seven minutes’ walk to the hotel.

I am not sure which team is stronger: The Experience team, the Rising Stars team or the Seconds team. Maybe the Seconds team can play the winner. All kidding aside, this is a wonderful and interesting event. I predict that the Rising Stars will win comfortably.

Here is the official website.