Indian Grandmaster P Harikrishna will be competing against Frenchman Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in the elite chess tournament at De Moriaan, in the Netherlands on Saturday.
Ranked 22nd in the world, seventh seed Hari is part of a 14-player field that includes World No 1 Magnus Carlsen and second-ranked Fabiano Caruana. The new year upcoming event will be competed in round-robin format where young and experienced players will be taking part and the experienced players will have likes of Grandmasters who will compete against the best in the business.
The pairings were released on Friday which states that World number 1 Magnus Carlsen will lock horns against Iranian Alireza Firouzja and Caruana takes on Dutchman Jorden Van Foreest.
Anish Giri who is currently seeded as rank number 4 will start his campaign against Aryan Tari.
Let’s have a look at the First round pairings described below
First-round pairings: P. Harikrishna v Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (Fra); Magnus Carlsen (Nor) v Alireza Firouzja (FIDE); Fabiano Caruana (USA) v Jorden Van Foreest (Ned); Anish Giri (Ned) v Aryan Tari (Nor); Radosław Wojtaszek (Pol) v David Anton Guijarro (Esp); Andrey Esipenko
(Rus) v Jan-Krzysztof Duda (Pol). Nils Grandelius (Swe) v Alexander Donchenko (Ger).
Harikrishan was one of the youngest player from India to become Grandmaster on 12th September 2001 until the record was broken by D Gukesh. He clinched back to back titles which include the tally of Commonwealth Championships, World Junior Champion and Asian Individual Championship in 2001, 2004 and 2011 respectively.
In Feburary 2013, His rating for the first time surpassed over 2700.He break into top 10 players of the World in November 2016 with a FIDE rating of 2768.
