FIDE Candidates Tournament 2026

The 2026 Candidates Tournament was held in Pegeia, on the western coast of Cyprus, from March 28 to April 16, 2026, at the Cap St Georges Hotel & Resort. The eight participants — qualified through the FIDE Grand Swiss 2025 in Samarkand, the 2025 World Cup in Goa, the FIDE Circuit, and by rating — played a double round-robin to decide who would challenge Gukesh Dommaraju for the world title.

The event belonged to Javokhir Sindarov. The twenty-year-old from Uzbekistan, who had already won the 2025 World Cup, won the Candidates with 10/14 — the highest winning score, relative to the field, in the tournament’s history, ahead of Anish Giri on 8½ and Fabiano Caruana on 7½. With it he became the challenger for the 2026 World Chess Championship and one of the youngest players ever to reach a title match.

The field was completed by Wei Yi, Hikaru Nakamura, Matthias Blübaum, Praggnanandhaa, and Andrey Esipenko. The classical format was the standard Candidates set-up: 14 rounds at classical time control (90 minutes for 40 moves, then 30 minutes for the rest, with a 30-second increment from move one), and no draws by agreement before move 30.

The Candidates is the most prestigious non-championship event in chess. Every player who has held the world title since the FIDE era began has done so by winning a Candidates or its equivalent. Recent winners include Ian Nepomniachtchi (2020, 2022) and Gukesh Dommaraju (2024) — the latter at age seventeen, then the youngest Candidates winner in history. Sindarov, at twenty, extended the tournament’s recent theme: its winner is once again a player from the game’s youngest generation.

For round-by-round results, the FIDE-rated games database, and broadcast coverage, see the FIDE Candidates page linked in the right column.