First major test for Gukesh

There are plenty of others with very high ratings in their mid-teens, including Lance Henderson de la Fuente of Spain, who scored a Grandmaster Norm last year, and Prithu Gupta of India, who also played impressively at last year’s event. 

Gibraltar Masters section, which has a prize fund of £25,000, has 14 players with ratings of 2700 or more, and a further 24 rated between 2600 and 2700.

The top seed in 2019 is 28-year-old French GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, rated 2780 on the January list, which puts him at number six in the world. Levon Aronian, Wesley So and Hikaru Nakamura are the other big guns.

So is making his debut in Gibraltar. His annus mirabilis was 2017 when he maintained a 2800+ rating until the latter stages of the year. Since then, he has slipped just a bit in the rankings. The 25-year-old Philippines-born American is currently 11th in the pecking order although he was as high as second behind the world champion on four lists in 2017.

Nakamura has won here four times, excelling in tie-break situations and also winning three consecutive titles, from 2015 to 2017. Last year, he failed to continue his streak as he was outblitzed by Vachier-Lagrave in the tie-break semi-finals.

The remaining 2700+ rated players, in rating order, are David Navara (Czech Republic), Arkadij Naiditsch (Azerbaijan), Nikita Vitiugov (Russia), Le Liem Quang (Vietnam), Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukraine), Vladislav Artemiev (Russia), Rauf Mamedov (Azebaijan), Michael Adams (England) and Maxim Matlakov (Russia).

The race for the top women’s prize of £15,000 will be equally fascinating. Ju Wenjun is the top-rated woman competitor at the tournament.

Koneru Humpy of India has played twice before at Gibraltar in 2010 and 2012, scoring 7 and 6 respectively. The former would normally be a winning score for the women’s top prize, but Natalia Zhukova also scored 7 that year and had a better tournament performance rating.

The 31-year-old Indian player reached number two in the world in 2006 when she was still a teenager and has remained there or thereabouts for many of the intervening years. But, she has recently slipped to number five after shedding rating points from her one-time high of 2622.