Grandmaster P. Harikrishna will be the driving force as a slightly depleted Indian team will take on some of the finest teams in the World Team Chess championship, in Tsaghkadzor.
Harikrishna, the lone Indian in the top fifty of world ranking besides Viswanathan Anand, along with Krishnan Sasikiran has a task cut out.
S P Sethuraman, Vidit Santosh Gujarathi and Deep Sengupta are the other members of the team.
Qualified by virtue of a historic bronze medal winning performance in the last chess Olympiad, the Indians will surely miss Parimarjan Negi and B. Adhiban who were both a part of the Olympiad triumph.
Negi, now studying in United States, is no longer a professional player while Adhiban did not qualify as he did not participate in the last National championship. Anand is obviously unavailable as he is playing in the Shamkir tournament across the border.
Harikrishna is in fine fettle and should be able to guide the team. A medal-winning performance will be however possible if the Indians do well on lower boards with Sethuraman and Gujarathi as Sasikiran is likely to hold his ground well too.
On paper, the Russian team starts as the overwhelming favourite but there is much more to it than meets the eye.
Alexander Grischuk, Sergey karjakin, Evgeny Tomashevsky, Dmitry Jakovenko and Nikita Vituigov are all formidable names in the world of chess but still the team is without king pin Vladimir Kramnik (busy in Shamkir) and Peter Svidler.
Armenia has always gelled well as a team and this time should be no exception. Levon Aronian will mostly don the top board for the hosts and he has able lieutenants in Gabriel Sargissian, Vladimir Akopian, Sergei Movsesian and Hrant Melkumyan.
However, all eyes will be on Olympiad champions China that never ceases to spring a surprise. Ding Liren, Yu Yangyi and Wei Yi is a dangerous trio of players against any opposition while Xiangzhi Bu can be lethal on any day too.
The surprise inclusion is International Master Wang Chen, who recently also was part of the team in a match against India that the Chinese won in Hyderabad.
Ukraine, Hungary, Israel, Cuba and United States complete the line-up and among these Ukraine has some big names too including former FIDE world champion Ruslan Ponomariov and Vassily Ivanchuk.
The tournament will have nine rounds in all among ten teams with each team playing once against the other. There will be four games in each round and the team scoring 2.5 points or above will be awarded with two match points.
In case of a tied result the point will be split and the team with maximum match points will be declared the winner.
