Tournament director Loek van Wely has succeeded in organizing two top-level matches for the Hoogeveen Chess Tournament, from Sunday 16 up to and including Saturday 22 October in the town hall of Hoogeveen. Womenâs World Champion Hou Yifan will face former vice World Champion Nigel Short, and the Dutch top talent Jorden van Foreest will cross swords with two-time Dutch champion Ivan Sokolov.
Not only are all of these four players great fighters at the chessboard, but three of them are, or were, also chess prodigies. Short already belonged to the world chess elite at a very young age. Hou Yifan was the youngest World Champion ever, at 16, in 2010. Jorden van Foreest is the greatest Dutch talent behind Anish Giri, and he wants to fight his way to the world elite as well. The 17-year-old grandmaster already took a big step last year when he lost his match with Jan Timman by only the narrowest of margins. Sokolov was a quick starter too: at 19 he was already a grandmaster, and since 1992 he has been playing in the Netherlands, where he has achieved many successes.
The match between Hou Yifan and Short may become piquant, since the Englishman once wrote that women are still clearly worse at chess than men. He added that if anyone could bridge this gap, it would be Hou Yifan. And the strongest woman player in the world gladly comes to Hoogeveen to prove Short right.
The matches will be played over six rounds. Wednesday 19 October is a rest day. Concurrent with the matches, an open tournament will be played, with many grandmasters from all over the world. The Indian Abhijeet Gupta, last yearâs winner, will try to repeat this success here. He will get competition from, among others, the Dutch grandmasters Sipke Ernst and Jan Werle, and an âold handâ, Oleg Romanishin. There are also two amateur tournaments.


Things are going fast, as they should, with this young descendant of a famous Dutch chess family. Right before last yearâs match with Jan Timman, Jorden van Foreest had earned the grandmaster title. In 2013 he was already U14 European Champion. The 2nd great-grandson of the former Dutch champions Dirk and Arnold van Foreest (both won the title three times â something which Jorden hasnât achieved yet!) narrowly lost to the former world top player Timman. After that, he steeled his nerves in various events. In the Staufer Open he shared second place, he won the Groningen Open together with Sundar Shyam, and became Talent of the Year 2015 in his own province, Groningen. In the strong B-group of the Tata Steel tournament he ended at 50%, and in the equally strong Aeroflot Open he made it 5 out of 9. After that Jorden took an âaltitude trainingâ by grandmaster Alexey Dreev with his coach Sergey Tiviakov. In May, he came shared second in the Limburg Open, and he won the national FischeRandom chess title. In June, he won the Utrecht Open. Jorden van Foreest is ready for the big ones!
One of those players who have settled in the Netherlands and have enormously enriched our chess life. Bosnian Ivan Sokolov became a grandmaster at 19, he was Yugoslavia champion in 1988, and came to our country in 1992. He became Dutch champion in 1995 and 1998, and in 2002 he officially became a Dutch citizen. Right after that, the Netherlands pronounced him chess player of the year (in 2003). With his exuberant chess and life style he is a favourite of the public. His victory over the then World Champion Garry Kasparov in the Hoogovens tournament 1999 was fantastic. In Hoogeveen, Sokolov has already two tournament victories to his name, in 2004 and 2008. In 2005 he was a member of the Dutch team that became European champion.
Hou Yifan has a special connection with the Netherlands. At twelve, she already scored 7 out of 13 in the C-groep of the Corus tournament (2007). After that she played four more times in Wijk aan Zee â twice in the Masters group. At 8 she was already U10 Girls World Champion, and in December 2010 she became the youngest ever World Champion by winning a match against her compatriot Ruan Lufei. In womenâs chess she has been the undisputable number one ever since, but just like her illustrious predecessor, Judit Polgar, she has also amply proved she can hold her own against top-level men as well. In 2011, Hou Yifan successfully defended her title against Humpy Koneru; in 2013 she convincingly beat Anna Ushenina in a match. In 2015 she decided not to defend her title in the FIDE knock-out tournament. That event was won by Maria Muzychuk, who had no chance in a match versus Hou Yifan this year. In 2012, the Chinese shared first place in the Gibraltar Masters with Nigel Short, her opponent in Hoogeveen this year. In 2015 the Englishman wrote an article about womenâs chess in New In Chess, which was nuanced but still caused quite a stir. Although woman chess players have become stronger, they still arenât as good at it as the men, Short claimed. If there is anyone who can belie this today, it is Hou Yifan. Which was also what Short wrote in the same article…
Nigel Short is the oldest Wunderkind in this company. In 1984, he became a grandmaster â the youngest in the world at the time. He is an extremely active chess player who travels all around the world, winning countless tournaments. Antarctica is the last continent where he has no tournament to his name yet! Short already took part in the Candidates Matches for the World Championship in 1988, but in 1991 and 1992 the Englishman was really on a roll. He defeated the man who was thought to be unbeatable, Anatoly Karpov, in a match, and then he did the same to our champion Jan Timman. After some quarreling with FIDE about the organization of the World Championship match against Garry Kasparov, both players founded the PCA. In London 1993, Short lost the match 7œ-12œ, but it wasnât as one-sided as this score seems to suggest. Short carried on playing tournaments (in the Essent tournament in Hoogeveen, 2004, he came second with 3 out of 6), travelling and promoting chess. On that subject he has been writing engaging and often provoking articles in the magazine New In Chess for several years. Even though he wrote in one of those articles that women are less good at chess than men, he knows very well that Hou Yifan wonât be an easy prey for him.







