We’ve been waiting for a year, and now the moment is nearly upon us! The Candidates Tournament starts a week from tomorrow — Saturday, March 28 — with an opening ceremony. The next day: Let the games begin! Two and a half weeks later we’ll have a winner, and that winner will have earned the right to go up against the World Champion in a one-on-one match for the title later this year.

How did we get here? It’s been a little more than a year since Gukesh Dommaraju, then only 18 years old, claimed the title of World Champion from the one-termer Ding Liren. Ding was China’s first world champion. Gukesh became India’s second, after Vishy Anand. A wildly variable player, especially in tighter time controls, Gukesh in some senses out-Dinged Ding in their match. He was super-solid, running a 14-game marathon with preternatural solidity, keeping his head in the game while his opponent – visibly rattled for months even before the tournament – made the ever-less-occasional mistake or blunder. Ding gave away a knight in the tournament’s absolutely brutal Game 11, which was and is truly shocking stuff.

Gukesh’s victory made him the youngest world champion in history. It must be said: He has had an extremely mediocre reign. Last year his compatriot R Praggnanandhaa kicked his ass in the 2025 Tata Steel tiebreaks; he placed a ho-hum third in Norway Chess; he flamed out hard in the FIDE Grand Swiss, finishing an astonishing 41st out of 116; he got bounced from the World Cup early by a no-name German grandmaster. Just last month, in the 10-person field at Prague Masters, he tied for last, losing four games and winning only one. He is currently ranked World #10. 

His challengers smell blood. But who knows? Maybe Gukesh is a machine built solely for the World Championship Tournament – a match that has a long and proud legacy, but which is increasingly less and less important when the viewership and the sponsorship money is moving toward spicier time controls, weird freestyle variants and, generally speaking, events outside the control of FIDE, the stodgy old international federation that still wants to claim to be the boss of chess.

FIDE’s not entirely out of the game, though. The old brand still has some juju to it, and so here we are just a week away from the Candidates — a grueling double round-robin melee in which we pick a champion to go up against The Chennai Kid. 

The field is pretty spicy: Several tip-top players and a few wild cards, and almost any of them would make for an fascinating challenger to the current champ. But before we get there, we should note who is not at the Candidates Tournament.

First and foremost, of course: 35-year old Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, the undisputed best chess player in the world and the possible best chess player of all time. He will not be at the tournament. After winning FIDE’s world championship five times he declared himself bored with the proceedings, bored with classical chess generally and annoyed with FIDE, and so he walked away from his title, which is the only thing that allowed Ding and then Gukesh to claim it in the first place.

Magnus debriefs with Levy Rozman after FIDE arbiters kicked him out of the World Rapid & Blitz Championship hall in December 2024 … because he was wearing jeans. But his actions were saying “F### You” to FIDE long before that.

Among those who fell short of qualifying for this year’s tournament: American enfant terrible Hans Niemann, who was the other party in the scandal that blew open the chess world in 2022. (Coming soon to Netflix!) Niemann has built a rabid online following that thrills to his performance of an aggrieved loner standing defiantly against the depredations of the “Chess Mafia,” but after losing to Anish Giri in the Grand Swiss and flaming out hard in the second round of the Chess World Cup he’ll have to wait for another year to achieve his vengeance on everyone who ever crossed him.

Other people you might have rooted for, but who didn’t make the cut: Ding, whose heart no longer seems in the game … two-time Candidates winner Ian Nepomniachtchi, Russian #1, last seen complaining about the food options at the Chess World Cup in Goa … Arjun Erigaisi, who has been India’s actual #1 ranked player for most of the past two years … American eminence Levon Aronian, who had a banner year in freestyle chess but fell just short … French-Iranian clotheshorse Alireza Firouzja … Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, French speed chess specialist … Vincent Keymer, the great German hope … Hungarian sorcerer Richard Rapport … dangerous Uzbek Nodirbek Abdusattorov … American enigma Wesley So … sassy Russian heartthrob Danil Dubov … many others …

But OK, enough about them! Let’s take look at your 2026 Candidates!

1. Hikaru Nakamura. World #2. USA. 38 years old.

Hikaru has to be the world’s most famous top-ranked player, outside of Magnus. He’s the Draymond Green of chess: defense-minded, lightning-fast reaction speed, infinitely GIFable, a very strong Alfred E. Neuman vibe. He literally doesn’t care!

Or does he? He cares at least enough to make a tour of “Mickey Mouse” tournaments late last year, such as the Iowa State Championship, just to get enough games in to qualify for the Candidates as the highest-rated player who is not Magnus.

The rises and falls and re-rises of Hikaru are almost too many to enumerate. He went from child prodigy to pre-pandemic washout to Twitch streamlord to, somehow, the world number two. Crucially, he made the decision to pivot from living off his chess winnings to living off of his streaming profits during the chess boom of the pandemic years, and in doing so he struck it rich. He makes more money than any almost other chess player, because chess doesn’t pay all that much, and that relief of pressure has allowed his game to blossom anew. He has rocketed up the FIDE rankings and for some time has stood below only Magnus.

The fact that he’s wealthy and they’re not means that Hikaru catches a lot of hate from other players, and he’s never been one to back down from a brawl. Here he is in pre-COVID days, getting into a (losing) fistfight with Canadian grandmaster Eric “Chessbrah” Hansen at some drunken house party.

Amazing to hear legendary commentator Yasser Seirawan call the fight to Fabi as if it were an over-the-board game.

Last year everyone got fake-mad at Hikaru all over again after his crowning moment at the USA v. India friendly match, when he checkmated Gukesh with seconds on the clock and proceeded to chuck his opponent’s king into the crowd.

Fun is frowned upon, it seems.

The hate continues. Nepomniachtchi recently claimed that Hikaru has “zero” chance of winning, despite the fact that he’s the second-highest rated player in the world, despite the fact that he holds winning records against Fabi, Anish and Pragg — the other main contenders — and despite the fact that he continues to have a strong record when he does play top tournaments. He won last year’s Americas Cup going away, for example, and had a strong finish at Norway Chess, which Magnus won.

2. Fabiano Caruana. World #3. USA. 33 years old.

“Fabi,” as we call him – makes him sound like the lead singer in a ’90s Italian boy band, which is sort of a poetic truth – is universally beloved. He won the Candidates and made the World Championship match in 2018, at which point Magnus decided to toy with his food by forcing 12 draws in a row then smashing the upstart in speed-chess tiebreaks. Nevertheless, Carlsen would later say that prime Fabi was only the opponent in his career who gave him jitters at the classical time control. Not all of those draws were guaranteed.

He was on something of a lull during the pandemic, but surged right back to the top in its aftermath. He qualified for the last Candidates in like four different ways and came within a hair’s breadth of claiming Gukesh’s place. In the last round, Nepomniachtchi can be seen apologizing for knocking him out of contention.

Nepo was already eliminated. This draw eliminated Fabi, too, and Nepo was very sad about that. Everyone loves Fabi.

But for the nonce, anyway, when he gets knocked down, he gets up again. He’s had an incredible run since the last Candidates, including repeating as US Champion for the fourth straight year. (To be fair, Hikaru didn’t play.) Most people are picking him as the favorite to win the tournament.

For me, my favorite Fabi moment is when he pulled a fast one on Firouzja in last year’s Champions Chess Tour. Watch commentators Robert Hess and David Howell lose their shit in this clip. Fast-forward to 1:20 if you just want to see Hess’s mind blown when he figures out what Fabi is up to.

3. Wei Yi. World #7. China. 26 years old.

This is the Wei. Photo: Frans Peeters - via Flickr., CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Little bit mad at Wei Yi, seeing as how he splashed cold water all over California’s own Sam Shankland amid his miracle run in the World Cup. But fair is fair, and Wei rocketed straight through Shankland to the finals, where he ran into the brick wall that was Sindarov. Good enough!

The youngest person in history to reach a “super-GM” rating of 2700 ELO — he managed it at age 15 — Wei is known as an aggressive, creative, tactical player, which could be another way of saying “sloppy.” He’s been out of contention for the last few Candidates’ cycles, but look at this — out of nowhere, he enters this tournament as the third-highest ranked player, sitting just one rating point ahead of Anish in the FIDE Top 100 — mostly because several players above him have fallen.

Does being the third highest-ranked make him the third most likely to win this tournament? The commentariat certainly doesn’t think so. Though Wei is universally acknowledged to be a crafty attacker, the smart money seems to believe that he’s not likely to go the distance in a 14-game tournament.

4. Anish Giri. World #8. Netherlands. 31 years old.

Once upon a time, Chess.com hooked Magnus Carlsen up to a lie detector for a promotional video and asked him if he had the highest IQ of all the top chess players.

“Nope,” he said, quickly and finally.

Then who has a higher one?

“I think Giri is quite smart.”

No lies were detected.

Certainly Anish is unusual among top-ranked chess players for his verbal wit and his joie de vivre, both of which are regularly on display on his popular Twitter feed. Most players at the top level are too permanently angsty to have the amount of fun that Giri lets himself have.

… though it must be said that his tweets have gotten a little spiky of late, perhaps as the pressure of the upcoming tournament mounts.

The scouting report in recent years has been that he’s an overcautious player whose subconscious is always playing for a draw, and maybe his ho-hum early 2020s had given that some weight. But then he stepped up and outlasted all comers in the FIDE Grand Swiss, blasting Niemann off the board in the final round and edging out Firouzja, Blübaum and Keymer along the way. Now he’s back for his third Candidates – the first since the pandemic-interrupted 2020 tournament, in which he placed third.

5. Javokhir Sindarov. World #12. Uzbekistan. 20 years old.

Sindarov is a rising superstar, so we’re not exactly talking about a Keymer/Blübaum situation here — see below — but I’m pretty sure most everyone was surprised to see him make the Candidates before his countryman Abdusattorov, who has held had a place on the world stage for quite a few years.

Maybe they shouldn’t have been. Sindarov has been on an amazing heater these last few months. He crushed all comers in the 206-player 2025 World Cup in Goa, which punched his ticket to the Candidates. He’s only 20 and he’s been living in Abdusattorov’s shadow for much of his life, but now he’s coming into his own. A lot of people are picking him as a dark horse to emerge from the Candidates … and maybe not so dark, neither. Just so many unanswered questions.

Uzbekistan, by the way, is almost as nuts for chess as India is. Maybe it is one of the three superpower chess countries in the world at the moment, with India and the USA. Sindarov will have millions of countrymen rooting him on. Look what happened when he won the World Cup! The president got him on the horn right away and they had a massive reception for him when he got off the plane! The nation bought him an apartment!

6. Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa. World #13. India. 20 years old.

Pragg. Photo: Frans Peeters - via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

The surprise isn’t that Pragg qualified for the Candidates, earning a chance to take on Gukesh, his compatriot and coeval. The surprise is that Pragg is the only other Indian player to qualify. The whole nation has gone chess-mad as the children of Vishy Anand grow up and assume the mantle, and they have to be ranked as the hottest chess nation in the world right now. They even have a couple of famous three-year-olds who would crush you or me over the board.

A few years ago, a lot of people thought that Arjun Erigaisi would be the first of the young Indians to become world champion, but he didn’t make the Candidates last year or this one. The road to the Candidates is variable and capricious, so sometimes it can go like that. Vidit Gujarati – a bit older than the Gukesh/Arjun/Pragg generation — did make the Candidates last time, but stumbled this year. Nihal Sarin? Maybe someday, but not today.

So that leaves Pragg, whose current sixth-place ranking among the candidates belies his actual strength — or so the wise men would have you believe. Unlike Wei, Sindarov, Blübaum or Esipenko, Praggnananda has played in a Candidates tournament before, despite being only 20 years old as of right now. He finished fifth in the India-heavy 2024 tournament, well behind a Gukesh-Hikaru-Nepo-Fabi logjam at the top. But the general gestalt among the chess cognoscenti is that this experience counts for a lot, and Pragg’s current rating is much lower, on paper, than it should be.

The rap on the Young Indians — Pragg most definitely included, and Gukesh too — is that they’ve sacrificed their lives to the 64 squares, and that has in some sense turned out to be a weakness. Check out Dubov making this point succinctly in the clip below. 

But certainly most contenders have a healthy fear of that single-minded drive. In his own predictions about the outcome of the Candidates, Magnus picks Pragg from the field as one of the three possible contenders, along with Fabi and Hikaru.

Pragg’s style isn’t flashy, but he’ll almost never make a glaring mistake. He’s a positional player. He’s an anaconda, not a cobra. He doesn’t look for the risky strike. He’d rather gain a tiny advantage and squeeze you out. In short, perhaps he has exactly the appropriate style for a tournament as long and grueling as the Candidates. We’ll see!

Fun fact: Pragg’s sister, Vaishali, will be playing in the Women’s Candidates Tournament, which runs simultaneously with the main event.

7. Matthias Blübaum. World #32. Germany. 28 years old.

Everyone thought Keymer was going to carry the flag for Germany, especially after he shot up through the rankings so dramatically this year. But along comes Blübaum to grind out second place in the FIDE Grand Swiss, and so he gets the golden ticket instead.

Nothing else is known about him. Except that he destroyed Gukesh with the black pieces in January’s Tata Steel tournament.

8. Andrey Esipenko. World #33. Russia. 24 years old.

Esipenko scraped out third place in the World Cup (beating yet another Uzbek!), which means that Russia just barely maintains its unbroken run of having at least one player in the Candidates, going back to the tournament’s inception in 1950. Times sure have changed – only one Russian on chess’s top stage, and he a massive underdog.

He seems like a nice lad. In 2022 he joined Nepo, Dubov and 41 other top Russian players in signing an open letter in protest of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He’s playing under the FIDE flag, as Russia is still sanctioned.

Does he have a chance? Probably not. But you may think differently!

###

The time has come! You must pick your champion! Who do you pick?