Every year for some time now in Hoogeveen, their chess festival includes a four-player double round robin event. The usual formula called for a world champion, the world junior champion, a Dutchman and a woman*. (Preferably the women's world champion or the highest-rated woman.) They got the last two, but not the first two. Top dog in this year's Unive Crown Group is Hikaru Nakamura, who may have been #5 or #6 in the world when he got the invitation. Anish Giri is the #2 player in the world among those under 21, so I guess he's the ersatz world junior champ, though he also counts as a Dutchman, obviously. However, that status probably goes to Sergei Tiviakov, as he doesn't come close to fitting any of the other categories. Finally, they've usually invited Judit Polgar, but this time it's women's world champion Hou Yifan filling the role.
Round 1 took place earlier today, and Nakamura got to work on repairing the damage done to his rating in his recent events by grinding down Giri on the White side of the 5.Re1 anti-Berlin. For a long time it had a (deserved) reputation as a deadly dull, non-threatening system (when White plays 7.Bf1, that is; 7.Bd3 lines are much sharper), but in recent years White has found ways to pressure Black. So it was here: Giri never quite managed to equalize, and finally went down after a lot of suffering. In the other game, Tiviakov had to suffer a little with Black in a Rubinstein French, but not too much. Hou Yifan wound up with the better half of an opposite-colored bishop ending, but it wasn't enough to win (or even close).
* I have to admit, that formula always reminds me of former U.S. Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt's infamous remark about the diversity of an advisory panel. That was back in 1983, before the need for politically correct speech was as stifling as it is now, but by practically any standard his remarks were stratospherically impolitic.