FIDE Candidates Chess Tournament 2022: All The Information (2024)

GM Ian Nepomniachtchi won the 2022 Candidates Tournament with one round to spare, repeating his impressive feat from the last Candidates.GM Ding Liren finished the tournament in second place and is facing Nepomniachtchi for the title of FIDE World Champion after Carlsen forfeited the title.

This guide contains all the information about the 2022 FIDE Candidates Tournament: details on players, schedule, results, regulations, and more.

Chess.com's coverage of the 2022 FIDE Candidates Tournament ran from June 16 through July 7. This event was the most important of the year as the world's best players gathered to fight for a chance to play for the world championship title in 2023.

• Pairings And Results
• Final Standings
• Watch The Live Broadcast On Chess.com
• Schedule
• Format
• Players
• Prize Pool
• Location
• On-Site ChessKid Event
• Guess The Result Contest
• Regulations
• History Of The Candidates Tournament

Pairings And Results

Below you can see the pairings and results for the 2022 Candidates Tournament.

Final Standings

Watch The Live Broadcast On Chess.com

Check the games on our dedicated events page with the engine, analysis function, and more. The live broadcast of the event featured commentary by GMs Daniel Naroditsky, Jon Ludvig Hammer, Robert Hess, IM Danny Rensch, IM Almira Skripchenko, and WGM Dina Belenkaya. You can also enjoy the event's replayat YouTube.com/ChesscomLive.

Schedule

Below you can see the detailed schedule of the 2022 Candidates Tournament:

Format

• Eight players competed in a double round-robin tournament (14 rounds)
• Time control: 120 minutes for the first 40 moves, 60 minutes for the next 20 moves, then 15 minutes for the rest of the game with a 30-second increment per move starting on move 61.
• Draws by mutual agreement were not allowed before Black's 40th move
• Players earned 1 point for a win, 0.5 points for a draw, and 0 points for a loss
• The player with the most points at the end of the 14 rounds became the champion
• The winner earned the right to play in the 2023 FIDE World Chess Championship.

Tiebreaks

If there was a tie for first place, tiebreaks would have consisted of up to three stages:

Stage 1

• If two players were tied, a 15+10 two-game match would have been played between them, with a drawing of lots determining the colors for the first game.
• If three to six players were tied, a single round-robin tournament with a 15+10 time control would have been played among the tied players
• If seven or eight players were tied, a single round-robin tournament with a 10+5 time control would have been played among the tied players.

Stage 2

If a tie for first place had persisted after stage one, stage two would have commenced as follows:

• If two players were tied, a 3+2 two-game match would break the tie, with a drawing of lots deciding the starting colors.
• If more than two players were tied, a single round-robin tournament with a 3+2 time control would have been played.

Stage 3

If a tie for first place had persisted after stage two, stage three would have commenced as follows:

• A knockout tournament would have decided the winner.
• If there were more than two players the bracket would have been determined by a drawing of lots.
• Each match of the knockout tournament would have consisted of a single 3+2 game, with colors determined by a drawing of lots.
• If any game of the knockout would have ended in a draw, players would keep alternating colors and played 3+2 games until a decisive game determined the winner.

You can find additional rules to break ties for all other positions on FIDE's regulations under section 4.4.2.

Players

The 2022 Candidates Tournament brought together eight of the best players in the world. In 2021, the field featured a mixture of seasoned players who had already participated in past editions of the event and young prodigies who stepped into the Candidates stage for the first time.

Ian Nepomniachtchi (31) Ian Nepomniachtchi (2766, Russia) qualified as the 2021 FIDE World Championship runner-up. Nepomniachtchi won the 2020-2021 Candidates Tournament with a round to spare but eventually lost to Carlsen in Dubai.
Teimour Radjabov (34) Teimour Radjabov (2753, Azerbaijan) was invited by FIDE to play the 2022 Candidates after qualifying for the previous edition of the event and refusing to participate due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jan-Krzysztof Duda (24) Jan-Krzysztof Duda (2750, Poland) qualified by winning the 2021 FIDE World Cup, even beating Carlsen in the process. He was also the player who stopped the world champion's unbeaten 125-game streak in 2020.
Alireza Firouzja (18) Alireza Firouzja (2793, France) qualified after winning the 2021 FIDE Chess.com Grand Swiss. Firouzja broke the record for the youngest player ever to cross the 2800 rating barrier.
Fabiano Caruana (29) Fabiano Caruana (2783, United States) qualified for ending the 2021 FIDE Chess.com Grand Swiss in second place. Caruana won the 2018 Candidates and drew 12 games against Carlsen during the world championship match.
Ding Liren (29) Ding Liren (2806, China) qualified as the highest-rated classical player, replacing GM Sergey Karjakin after he was banned from official FIDE events for six months starting on March 21, 2022.
Hikaru Nakamura (34) Hikaru Nakamura (2760, United States) qualified by finishing in the top two in the 2022 FIDE Grand Prix. It will be his second appearance in a Candidates Tournament (2016).
Richard Rapport (26) Richard Rapport (2764, Hungary) qualified by finishing in the top two in the 2022 FIDE Grand Prix. It will be his first appearance in a Candidates Tournament.

Prize Pool

The 2022 Candidates Tournament had a €500,000 prize pool, distributed as follows:

• 1st: €48,000
• 2nd: €36,000
• 3rd: €24,000

The prize money was divided equally among players with an equal score after 14 rounds. Players also received €3,500 for every half-point they scored.

The final prize distribution was as follows:

GM Ian Nepomniachtchi, the winner of the tournament, earned the right to play against Carlsen in the 2023 FIDE World Chess Championship. Carlsen chose not to play, resulting in second-place GM Ding Liren also advancing to face Nepomniachtchi instead.

Location

In December 2021, FIDE announced that Madrid would host the 2022 Candidates Tournament. Spain is well known for its chess tradition. The country has hosted all the major chess events at least once, including two previous Candidates finals (1987 and 1993).

On-Site ChessKid Event

During the Candidates, ChessKid hosted the Intercontinental ChessKid Candidates, an on-site event where the strongest U-12 players in the world competed in the same game room as the Candidates. Players and their tutors got free accommodation, with the winners also getting a free one-year ChessKid gold membership. Read the report to learn what happened in the event.

Guess The Result Contest

During the 2022 Candidates Tournament, community members could participate in our Guess The Result contest for the chance to win cash prizes and diamond memberships. Any Chess.com member could take their guess on which player they believed would win each round of the event.

Members had a chance to win one of the prizes below at the end of the tournament:

• 1st: $1000
• 2nd: $600
• 3rd: $400
• 4th: $300
• 5th: $200
• 6th-10th: one-year diamond membership.

The winners of the Guess The Results contest were:

• 1st: @Stanied
• 2nd: @oliverLud
• 3rd: @Ranlit
• 4th: @blank1700
• 5th: @Lucic01
• 6th-10th: @Veeraram36, @khi127, @kristofferencrabay, @Daimona, and @Daki151

Guess The Result participants also entered into a daily random drawing to award a one-month Diamond membership.

Regulations

You can find the official regulations in this PDF.

History Of The Candidates Tournament

The Candidates Tournament has a long tradition. Its first edition happened in 1950 in Budapest, when GMs David Bronstein and Isaac Boleslavsky tied for first place. Bronstein then won a match against Boleslavsky to earn the right to play for the world champion title against GM Mikhail Botvinnik. The world championship match ended in a tie and, following the rules of the time, Botvinnik retained his title.

The 1953 Candidates Tournament in Zurich was the second and possibly the most famous edition of the event. GM Vassily Smyslov won that tournament and later drew his world championship match with Botvinnik. Three years later, Smyslov won the following Candidates in Amsterdam and then defeated Botvinnik to become the world champion.

GMs Boris Spassky, Viktor Korchnoi, Anatoly Karpov, and Viswanathan Anand are the only other players who qualified for another title match (not counting rematches guaranteed to a defeated champion) after losing the first match.

Spassky became the world champion after defeating GM Tigran Petrosian in 1969, but not before losing to him in 1966. Korchnoi wasn't as successful as Spassky and lost his matches against Karpov in 1978 and 1981. Karpov himself had to win the 1989 Candidates to play for the world title after losing the match against GM Garry Kasparov in 1987.

More recently, the 2013 Candidates Tournament in London was particularly dramatic. In a close fight for first place between Carlsen and GM Vladimir Kramnik, the two lost their final-round game and were tied. Carlsen won the tournament based on the second tiebreak (number of wins) and beat Anand later that year to become the new World Champion.

Another historic edition of the event happened between 2020 and 2021, this time for reasons unrelated to chess. FIDE decided to suspend the tournament halfway due to the COVID-19 pandemic—an unprecedented event in chess history. Nepomniachtchi, who finished the first half in second place, won the event with a round to spare after the tournament resumed.

Carlsen successfully defended his title against Anand, who won the 2014 Candidates Tournament, Karjakin (2016), Caruana (2018), and Nepomniachtchi (2021). GM Ian Nepomniachtchi won the 2022 Candidates Tournament and will now challenge Carlsen for the second consecutive time.