Can Dominguez handle the challenge?

There is no cake in Holland
BY Michel Contreras
[01.13.2009]- Updated at 10:50 am, Cuba

Last week we were rummaging in the files of the five main adversaries Leinier Dominguez will find in the strong Corus chess tournament, with the venue in the Holland city of Wijk aan Zee from next Friday on.

All of them – Ivanchuk, Carlsen, Morozevich, Radjabov and Movsesian- belong to the privileged group of the first in the quarterly classification of the FIDE. But in Corus the player from Guines will face other eight men more. Would they be the classical “cakes” from the tournament field?

Well, let me tell you it is not. The reality is there are hard opponents on each of the cases, figures with enough reference and proven talent. Let’s take a look…

The Armenian Levon Aronian has an ELO of 2750 units and he is the eleventh position on the scale. He was born on October the sixth, 1982, he won the universal championship sub-12 in 1994, and in 2005 he won the first World Cup held in Khanty, Russia.

A year later, Aronian was crowned in the super demanded tournament in Linares, and it is worth saying that he had defended the first board in the titles won by Armenia in the last two Olympic Games (Turin’06 and Dresde’08).

He had won twice consecutively the Corus (2007-2008), though in the recent one he could not manage in solitary, but he was even with the prodigious Carlsen.

Another very complicated adversary will be the Chinese Yue Wang (2739 points, thirteen on the scale of the planet), who was born on March 30th, 1987 in Taiyuan, Shanxi.

Universal monarch sub-12 in 1999, runner-up under 14 years in 2000, he won ten points from twelve possible in the forth Chinese board during the Olympic Games in Turin, where he got hold of the golden medal on that table. In Dresden, already heading his team, he won 6, 5 from ten.

Corus will at the same time enhance its prestige with the participation of the North American Gata Kamski (in the seventeenth post with 2725) a star born on June 2nd, 1974 in Novokusnetsk, former Soviet Union.

With a boring match but solid, Kamski reached the top of the World Cup’07 where he travelled undefeated all along the eighteen matches, and he hit monsters such as the Russian Peter Svidler, the Ukrainian Ruslan Ponomariov, Carlsen and, already in the very last, the Spanish Alexei Shirov.

Other two more luxury participants to the Holland appointment are the English Michael Adams (2712 units, 24 on the scale) and the Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin (2706, scale 27).

Adams was born in Cornualles on November 17th, 1971, he had won in Two Sisters and Dortmund, and he was twice in the crucial duel for the orbital title of the FIDE: 1997, when he was defeated by the Indian Anand, and in 2004, with the Uzbek Rustam Kasimdzhanov the player who destroyed Independente.

Meanwhile, Karjakin (January 12, 1990) got hold of the tournament of the Young Stars Kirishi’05, and in 2007 he was claimed European king in the flash chess among the no less than 370 chess players. Additional information: With just a dozen calendars fulfilled Karjakin brilliantly defeated the Russian Kramnik.

The rest of the rivals from the next Corus are from the host country, and in advance, they seem to be condemned to the last positions. That is: none of them goes beyond the bar of the 2700 ELO points. Nevertheless, Loek Van Wely (October 7th, 1972), Daniel Stellwagen (March 1rst, 1987) and Jan Smeets (April 5th, 1985), have already got interesting results in first level lids.

In relation to Leinier, we have already seen it, there hangs a hurricane. On Friday we will start sense if he could manage to pass.

Translator: Caridad Martinez Fernandez
Source: http://www.elhabanero.cubaweb.cu/2009