Five-time Puzzles Champion GM Ray Robson was first to qualify for the eight-player Knockout Finals of the 2026 Chess.com Puzzles Championship, and posted the day’s best score of 62. He was joined by GMs Pranav Venkatesh, Jeffery Xiong, and Mitrabha Guha, IMs Yoseph Theolifus Taher, Anthony Atanasov, and Grayson Rorrer, and FM James Chirilov.
FM Dimitrios Ladopoulos, a four-time runner-up, missed out on tiebreaks in the final round, as did crowd favorites GMs Faustino Oro and Oleksandr Bortnyk, who scored one point less.
The Knockout is on Friday, January 16, starting at 1 p.m. ET / 19:00 CET / 11:30 p.m. IST.
Knockout Bracket
Since it was launched in 2020, one player, Robson, has dominated the Chess.com Puzzles Championship.
After five titles in a row, however, 14-year-old GM Andy Woodward snatched the crown last year, despite Robson fighting his way back from the Losers bracket to force a Grand Final reset.
Alas, this year Woodward isn’t taking part as the event overlapped with the opening ceremony in Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands, where he’s playing in the Tata Steel Chess Challengers. The young American starts with Black against GM Bibisara Assaubayeva.
As we’ll see, that wouldn’t stop everyone, however, since 12-year-old Oro did choose tactics over the opening ceremony.
This is now the second year that the Puzzles Championship will launch a full year of action with the Chess.com Community Championships. All players can participate, and there’s something new to try out each month.
Anyone could join the first stage of the two-day Puzzles Championship, but only if they could score 50 points in a five-minute Puzzle Rush. The participants submitted Twitch or YouTube clips showing themselves completing that task in order to qualify.
Thursday featured five rounds of Puzzle Rush Royale. In each round, players attempted to score the best they could in three-minute Puzzle Rush, with a 30-minute timer ticking down for each round.
The goal of the first round was to finish in the top-20, although a minor mishap ultimately meant the top-21 would do!
Qualifiers After Round 1
Robson warmed up with what would turn out to be the day’s single best score, 62, but some notable players missed out, including six-time World Chess Solving Champion GM Kacper Piorun.
For the final four rounds the formula was simple, but brutal. In each round the bottom-three players were eliminated, while only the top-two qualified for Friday’s Knockout.
Round 2 Final Standings
This time Robson again posted the best score, and booked his spot in the Finals. He was joined by 17-year-old U.S. IM Atanasov (AA175), who left Xiong and Pranav with reason to feel they were unlucky after posting the same fantastic score of 60 but losing out on the tiebreak of the length of winning streaks. That was especially the case for Pranav, who would no doubt have liked to wrap things up fast after earlier falling to GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov in the final of the FIDE Freestyle Chess World Championship Play-In.
It’s often said that “chess is 99 percent tactics,” but in explaining how lower-rated players can do so well at tactics GM Maurice Ashley pointed out that “puzzle solving is a speciality, it’s its own art form,” while there are many more aspects to chess.
Maurice Ashley: “Puzzle solving is a specialty, it’s its own art form… An FM can compete with GMs in puzzle solving, because you fine tune a very specialized area of chess” pic.twitter.com/5f3HGYg3i5
— chess24 (@chess24com) January 15, 2026
We were down to 15 players in round three, and this is how they performed.
Round 3 Final Standings
10-year-old Ashwath Kaushik (Ash15K) forfeited in this round, likely because it was time for bed in Singapore!
Elsewhere the battle was intense, with Pranav finally getting the job done with a score of 59.
He was joined in qualifying by Taher, from Indonesia, while there was frustration for many of the star players. Bortnyk’s bewilderment was understandable when he was confronted by the following puzzle.
The black queen looks completely trapped, and Bortnyk’s hopes of a big score evaporated as he failed to find a solution. Can you spot the only winning move?
That meant we were down to 10 players and only two rounds to go.
Round 4 Results
This was Xiong’s moment, and although he was initially disappointed with not hitting 60 he rightly called his score “a big 59.”
Jeffery Xiong likely books his spot in tomorrow’s final with a 59 score in 3-minute Puzzle Rush! pic.twitter.com/BlZguIO44u
— chess24 (@chess24com) January 15, 2026
After that it was an absolute logjam, with five players hitting 56 and two more scoring 55, Oro and Bortnyk. They were the most animated players all day, with Oro’s cry of despair when he realized he should have put his rook on b4 at the end telling the whole story.
“Nooooooooo!” Faustino Oro misses the last two puzzles, but posts 55, which for now is enough to qualify for the final! pic.twitter.com/GVyYyvj54Y
— chess24 (@chess24com) January 15, 2026
20-year-old IM Rorrer, a.k.a. Grandmaster2B, had the longest winning streak and took the spot in the finals.
That left one nerve-wracking 30-minute session where five players competed for the final two spots.
Round 5 Results
It was insanely close, with all five players scoring 56 or 55 points. Jimis98, Greek FM Ladopoulos, was the player to miss out on the top score, denying him a chance to fight for the title after he finished runner-up to Robson in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
In the end Mitrabha (Mitrabhaa) and Chirilov (ShadowKing71) seized the final spots, with Oro and Bortnyk narrowly missing out.
The action now switches to a Knockout where the players compete in Puzzle Battle.
Chirilov gets the daunting task of facing Robson in the Quarterfinals, but all the players have two lives, since it’s double-elimination. Don’t miss all the action!
How To Watch
The Chess.com Puzzles Championship is the first event of the 2026 Chess.com Community Championships. Anyone can qualify to play in the Chess.com Puzzles Championship by submitting a Twitch or YouTube clip showing a 5-minute Puzzle Rush score of at least 50 points between January 12 and 14. Qualified players participate in a five-round Puzzle Rush Royale on January 15 where they attempt to get their highest 3-minute Puzzle Rush score before the 30-minute clock runs down. The top eight players move on to a double-elimination Knockout on January 16, featuring matches in Puzzle Battle. The Chess.com Puzzles Championship features a $5,000 prize fund.
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