Jorden van Foreest won the 83rd Tata Steel Masters in Wijk aan Zee in January 2021, defeating Fabiano Caruana in the tiebreak after both players finished the classical event tied for first. He was 21 years old, the youngest Dutch winner of the country’s premier chess tournament, and the first Dutchman to take it since Jan Timman in 1985. The win remains the single best result by a Dutch player of his generation.
His style is sharper than the modern Dutch consensus. He plays the King’s Indian and the Najdorf as Black, and his White repertoire features the Italian and the Catalan with a preference for unbalanced middlegame positions. He has been a regular at Wijk aan Zee since the late 2010s and a fixture in the European Team Championship for the Dutch national side.
He comes from a chess family — his older brother Lucas is also a grandmaster, and the two have collaborated on opening-preparation projects shared in interviews with the Dutch chess press. He plays selectively in 2026, trying to convert the 2021 result into a sustained presence at the very top.