Players like Arjun Erigaisi (left) and Praggnanandhaa (right) will be eyeing the FIDE World Cup to secure a spot at the Candidates tournament. (File Photo/ Partha Paul)
India will host the prestigious FIDE World Cup 2025 chess tournament this year. While FIDE initially named India as the host for the event on its website on Monday, later it changed the event’s details to state that the host will be announced soon.
However, an official of the All India Chess Federation, who requested anonymity, confirmed to The Indian Express that India will host the tournament later this year. FIDE’s website states that the event will be held from October 31 to November 27.
The FIDE World Cup offers the top three finishers a spot at the prestigious Candidates tournament, which is the pathway to become a challenger to Gukesh at the next World Championship. This is why for many of India’s top players like Arjun Erigaisi, Vidit Gujrathi and R Praggnanandhaa, the FIDE World Cup will be an event to circle on their calendars.
While the World Cup offers three spots in the eight–player Candidates tournament, it must be noted that 206 players compete for those three spots. The tournament is so notoriously tough to win that Magnus Carlsen only won his first World Cup in 2023.
The World Cup happens over eight rounds in a knockout format. The top 50 seeded players play from the second round onwards. Each one-on-one match at the FIDE World Cup is played as a set of two classical games, with colours exchanged between game 1 and 2. If the two games cannot decide a winner, there are tiebreaks.
It must be noted that at the last FIDE World Cup in 2023, Praggnanandhaa had reached the final to qualify for the 2024 Candidates. He had defeated the likes of Arjun Erigaisi, Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana before running into Magnus Carlsen in the final and losing that game. It was at that World Cup that the world had seen India’s might on the board — before the all-conquering year of 2024 — as four Indian players had breached the quarter-final stage in the 2023 World Cup.
The FIDE World Cup will mark the biggest event that India will host after missing out on the World Chess Championship, where two cities from India — Chennai and New Delhi — were in the fray but FIDE awarded the event to Singapore. India had been chasing hosting rights for last year’s World Championship because 18-year-old Gukesh was eyeing the chance to make history as the youngest world champion in the sport’s history.
The FIDE World Cup 2025 thus becomes the most high-profile event that the country will host after the Chennai Chess Olympiad in 2022.
India has previously hosted a FIDE World Cup — that was way back in 2002 in Hyderabad. Five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand had won that event.
2025 will see a separate FIDE Women’s World Cup also being hosted. FIDE has officially announced that the Women’s World Cup will be hosted in Batumi, Georgia from July 5-29. Like every year, capping 2025 off will be the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Championship. This year, the year-ending glitzy event will take place in Doha from December 25-31.
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