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One Story To Watch For Every FIDE Candidate

One Story To Watch For Every FIDE Candidate

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ktlincoln
| 131 | Fun & Trivia

It’s that time again. Every two years, the FIDE Candidates Tournament arrives, ready to nominate another challenger to go into the lion’s den and face off against the reigning World Champion of chess, and every two years, we have to answer the same question:

…Remind me who’s playing?

If you’re a more casual observer, you might be puzzled over one of the most unique events in modern sports. There isn’t any other major sport in which the champion gets to sit back and wait for his opponent to be selected, and the only other big-name competition whose participants shuffle each time is the UEFA Champions League. 

This is a large part of the tournament’s charm, though. Each one is fresh, and the stakes couldn’t be higher: if you can come out on top, then all you need to do is beat someone who isn’t GM Magnus Carlsen in order to be crowned the world champ! No disrespect to GM Gukesh Dommaraju, who basically said this himself after he won.

Most everyone has a shot—Gukesh was the third-lowest rated player in 2024. Here is the main storyline behind all eight hopefuls in this year's Candidate's Tournament.

Fabiano Caruana: Cementing A Legacy

The current world #3 behind only Magnus and Hikaru, GM Fabiano Caruana is the only candidate who has played in a world championship before. Back in 2018, he drew all 12 classical games against Magnus, the first and only time this has ever happened in the world championship, before losing in the rapid tiebreaks. He’s qualified for every Candidates Tournament since. 

Photo: Maria Emelianova/Chess.com.

Now, all of these guys deserve a shot in the championship—they made it here. But Fabiano is really deserving, and at 33, he’s the second-oldest player in the tourney, which means he might not have that many more shots left. Plenty of chess fans would love to see him crowned world champ, and it would be the culmination of an incredible career. It would also mean that Fabiano could avoid joining the category of best-ever players to never be crowned world champion, alongside such legends as GMs Viktor Korchnoi, David Bronstein, and Paul Keres.

Hikaru Nakamura: Entertainment Value

Welcome back, everyone! For today’s article, we’re going to be writing about GM Hikaru Nakamura, who is playing in the Candidates Tournament after his North American Tour, in which he played a bunch of what he called "Mickey Mouse" tournaments in order to get enough games under his belt to qualify for the Candidates with the highest rating. (This is written in the style of how Hikaru introduces his YouTube videos, just in case you thought I went insane.)

Was this a legal way to qualify for the tournament? Yes! Did it bug some people? Sure! But that’s kind of Hikaru’s specialty: as he talked about quite a bit during the last Candidates, he "is a streamer first… playing chess is somewhat secondary." (If that bothers you, your gripe might be more with the incentive structures of classical chess than Hikaru.)

Photo: Maria Emelianova/Chess.com.

Hikaru knows how to entertain, and we can rely on him to do that during this tournament; at the same time, we should appreciate that, at 38, it will probably be his last. (Although who knows: he’s already defied expectations before.) At the very least, if you follow Hikaru’s tournament closely, you’ll get plenty of bang for your buck: last year, he analyzed all of his games afterward, providing an incredible window into the mind of an elite chess player competing at the highest level.

Matthias Bluebaum: The Underdog

At a 2695 rating, good for 34th in the world, GM Matthias Bluebaum is currently the lowest-rated player in the Candidates this year, though that still puts him well clear of candidate GM Nijat Abasov’s 2632 rating in 2024, which had him as only the 114th-highest rated player at the time. But even though Bluebaum’s rating is just a hair under GM Andrey Esipenko’s, I’ll still give him the nod as our official underdog for three reasons: one, he also has the lowest betting odds; two, he’s five years older than Esipenko; and three, he’s had an underdog reputation for years now. As Chessbase once wrote: “In a now famous quote, GM Arkadij Naiditsch remarked that ‘Bluebaum is, of course, not a very strong player.’ Bluebaum took this harsh judgment in good spirit and used it tongue-in-cheek as the account name for his online chess activities.”

Photo: Michal Walusza/FIDE.

The German GM pursued his master’s in math at the same time as his chess career, which might explain in part why he spent much of the last few years in the 2640-60 range. (You try to get a master’s in math WITHOUT being a professional chess player.) But right now, he’s on a tear: in addition to his unbeaten second-place finish at the Grand Swiss that earned him his Candidates spot, he just turned in a stellar performance at Tata Steel, which included a win over fellow candidate GM Anish Giri, world champ Gukesh, and super-GM countryman Vincent Keymer. Like all great underdogs, Bluebaum could surprise us, and he certainly has a better shot than Abasov did last time around.

Javokhir Sindarov: Gukesh 2.0?

The Uzbekistani GM Javokhir Sindarov strikes me as this year’s Gukesh. Like Gukesh, he comes from a thriving chess country in which he’s not even unanimously considered the best player; like Gukesh, he’s the youngest competitor in the tournament; and like Gukesh in 2024, he seems to be far away from reaching his ceiling. 

Sindarov's World Cup win over GM Wei Yi, which landed him in the Candidates, made him the youngest winner of that tournament ever, and he followed it up with an undefeated second-place finish at Tata Steel that included a win over Bluebaum. (The winner of that tournament? Fellow Uzbek super-GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov.) On top of that, he celebrated his 20th birthday in December by beating Magnus Carlsen in Freestyle. He may not have the sample size of some of the other players in this tourney, but his form recently has been as good as anyone’s.

Photo: Michal Walusza/FIDE.

A Gukesh-Sindarov World Championship would be a preview of the next decade of top-level chess. And if their recent game at Tata Steel was any indication—Gukesh pulled off a brilliant queen sacrifice, but Sindarov still managed to hold for a draw—it should be a barnburner on the board as well.

Andrey Esipenko: Resiliency

Let’s set the scene. It’s the tiebreaker portion of the semifinals of the World Cup. The winner earns a spot in the Candidates. Andrey Esipenko is up two pawns in an endgame against Wei Yi, and if he can convert the position, he’ll be fighting for a chance at the World Championship. But as Wei will observe afterward, Esipenko’s worst-case scenario is a draw, assuming no catastrophic mistakes. Then this happened:

As Esipenko lingered at the board afterward, it wasn’t hard to imagine what he was thinking. Every chess player has done the same thing at one time or another… but most of us aren’t super grandmasters. It was one of the most heartbreaking blunders in recent memory.

In most cases, that would be that. Esipenko would have to go back home, lick his wounds, and prepare for the next cycle. But the unique thing about the World Cup is that it offers three Candidates spots, meaning that Esipenko still had a chance—assuming he could bounce back from hanging that rook. 

That’s exactly what he did, beating GM Nodirbek Yakubboev in both classical games to take third place and qualify. Chess is a mental game, and you only have to look at GM Ding Liren’s experience to see the kind of toll it can take on players. Esipenko might not be one of the favorites in the Candidates, but that kind of psychological resilience is worth a few rating points in a tournament this long and grinding.

Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu: Return On Investment

If I gave you the profile of a player who was about to play in his second Candidates tournament, just came off winning the 2025 FIDE Circuit, and has been an IM or higher for a full decade, you’d probably picture a veteran in his mid or late 20s, reaching the peak of an already full career—and you’d be way off. 

GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu fits all of these descriptions, and at 20 years old, he’s still the second-youngest player in this year’s Candidates. Read that again: this guy has already PLAYED in a Candidates, and the other three who also have—Caruana, Nakamura, and Giri—are all a decade older than him at least. It doesn’t hurt that Caruana and Wei Yi have both picked him as one of their favorites to win the tournament.

Photo: Maria Emelianova/Chess.com.

So if you’re looking for a player to invest some emotional energy in, you can’t go wrong with Pragg. This is a guy who has already demonstrated that he’s going to be a mainstay of top-level chess for a very long time. And as he demonstrated at the 2024 Candidates, when he busted out a Deferred Schliemann version of the Ruy Lopez that GM Peter Leko hadn’t seen in 25 years, he’ll keep showing all of us new things along the way. 

Wei Yi: The Smart Pick

Most people don’t consider Wei Yi to be a part of the top tier of the Candidates competitors: discussion has mainly focused around Caruana, Nakamura, Pragg, and then either Giri or Sindarov. Even Wei himself has downplayed his chances. But if you dig around, you’ll still find some folks pegging Wei as the dark horse, and there’s a good reason for that. 

Wei’s pedigree is about as good as it gets. He became the youngest grandmaster to break 2700, which he accomplished at the tender age of 15; he played what many consider to be one of the 21st century’s best games, with GM Daniel Naroditsky describing it as “the Modern Immortal”; and he won Tata Steel in 2024. If you go by rating, he’s actually third in the Candidates field, one point ahead of Giri and nine above Sindarov.

And yet: betting odds have him ahead of only Esipenko and Bluebaum. So if you want to look smart in front of all your chess friends, start talking up Wei’s chances. 

Anish Giri: Drama

Don’t get me wrong: Anish Giri’s Candidates should be fascinating for a number of chess reasons. First, there’s the legacy of his Draw Machine performance from the last time around, the only instance of a player drawing all of his games in Candidates history, and Giri’s own resentment of that reputation. Then there’s Giri’s significance as a figure in the chess world: he’s one of the most interesting and dynamic social-media presences, a leading opening theoretician, and a vocal figure on any number of topics. 

But at the same time: this guy has really been stirring the pot lately. In the last year alone, he’s picked fights with Hikaru, GM Ian Nepomniachtchi, and GM Peter Heine Nielsen, among others, and hasn’t shown any signs of settling down as the tournament has approached. 

At the end of the day, the Candidates tournament gets decided over the board. But when you play twice against each of the other players, those personal dynamics do come into play, and it’ll be interesting to see whether any of this translates into the Hikaru-Giri matches… or if any of the other competitors become targets for Giri’s Twitter fingers before the next World Championship challenger is crowned.