Candidates Madness 2026

Outside of the World Championship, the FIDE Candidates Tournament is arguably the most coveted tournament of international chess. Eight competitors, having qualified through a variety of means, will duke it out in a double round robin event to earn the right to challenge the FIDE World Chess Champion and FIDE Women's World Chess Champion for a chance to claim the very title for themselves.

Candidates Madness is your chance to predict the final outcomes guessing who you think will finish in 1st place, 2nd place, and so on to 8th place in both the Open and Women’s sections. The winner will be determined by the Cumulative Rank Difference, calculated as the sum of all the differences between the final and  predicted ranks of contestants.

This year's candidates are:

Open	Women's
Andrey Esipenko	Aleksandra Goryachkina
Anish Giri	Bibisara Assaubayeva
Fabiano Caruana	Divya Deshmukh
Hikaru Nakamura	Anna Muzychuk*
Javokhir Sindarov	Kateryna Lagno
Matthias Blubaum	Tan Zhongyi
Praggnanandhaa R	Vaishali Rameshbabu
Wei Yi	Zhu Jiner

* It is important to note that Humpy Koneru, who initially qualified for the Candidates by finishing 2nd in the 2025 FIDE Women’s World Cup, chose to withdraw from the tournament due to personal reasons. In her place FIDE had decided that Anna Muzychuk was the next most qualified player based on her performances in the 2024-25 FIDE Women’s events series. This last-minute choice of replacement occurred within less than one week of the start of the tournament.

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Congratulations to Javokhir Sindarov and Vaishali Rameshbabu for winning their respective sections! Here are the final rankings of the Candidates 2026 along with the predictions for each player:

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Below are tables show the predictions of everyone that participated. Congratulations to Cassie, Zach, and Kaushik for their closest predictions in the Open section and to Ori for the closest prediction in the Women's section.