GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu won the 2025 FIDE Circuit and joined 2024 winner GM Fabiano Caruana in qualifying for the 2026 FIDE Candidates Tournament. The International Chess Federation (FIDE) has now announced that for 2026-7 two years will be combined, with a player’s best 12 results counting for the final leaderboard. Other changes include a separate Open ranking only for events with 50+ players, and a lower bonus for the player who loses the world championship match.
The FIDE Circuit, a ranking based on performances in individual tournaments, has been run for the last three years and qualified GMs Gukesh Dommaraju (since first-place Caruana had already qualified), Caruana, and Praggnanandhaa to Candidates Tournaments.
FIDE Circuit Top Finishers (Candidates qualifiers in capitals)
| Year | 1st | FED | Score | 2nd | FED | Score | 3rd | FED | Score |
| 2023 | Caruana | 118.61 | GUKESH | 87.36 | Giri | 84.31 | |||
| 2024 | CARUANA | 130.42 | Arjun | 124.4 | Abdusattorov | 108.49 | |||
| 2025 | PRAGGNANANDHAA | 115.17 | Abdusattorov | 84.95 | Giri | 82.43 |
The final standings for 2025 became clear after the World Rapid and Blitz Championships in Doha—GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov could have come within a point or two of Praggnanandhaa with double gold, but in the end it was GM Magnus Carlsen who completed that feat for the fifth time. Praggnanandhaa won the Circuit by just over 30 points.
Praggnanandhaa’s success was powered by first place in Tata Steel, the Superbet Chess Classic, and the UzChess Cup Masters, with shared first in the London Chess Classic Open mathematically clinching first place. Note the 0.00 points for the FIDE World Cup mattered as it fulfilled a requirement for two events with over 50 players. A total of five smaller events could be counted, so that Praggnanandhaa’s scores in the Czech Republic and Poland were discounted.
The Circuit for 2026-7 will operate in a very similar manner, but let’s look at some significant changes.
The Circuit Will Now Run Over Two Years
The key change is that the cycle now runs over two years. We can expect it still to qualify two players to the Candidates, but it won’t be the case as in 2024 that Caruana could already celebrate qualification and then ignore the 2025 Circuit (though, notably, he still finished in fourth place in 2025!).
FIDE’s announcement talks of the “expansion of the number of results counted toward the final score,” though you could equally claim a reduction. Instead of up to seven results counting per year (and potentially 14 over two years), now 12 will count over two years. The regulations remain similar, with a maximum of four rapid and blitz events counting, while four events must feature more than 50 players if you want to post the maximum of 12 events.
12 Players Not 8 Count For Tournament Strength
The system for calculating scores remains almost identical except for the key change of assessing a tournament’s strength by the average rating of the top 12 players and not the top eight as previously. That will lower players’ scores and make it tougher especially for open events to provide a high number of Circuit points with top-heavy fields. We got the first example of the change with the 53rd Rilton Cup, which began in 2025 but ended in 2026 and was the first event eligible for the new cycle. 13 players finished in at least a tie for the top eight spots and gained points.
GM Xu Xiangyu‘s brilliant 8/9 earned him 5.62 points for sole first place in a tournament where the top 12 players had an average 2576.83 rating. In 2025 he would have earned 8.36 points, since the top eight players average out at 2613 points.
We’ll see the change even more clearly in the first big classical chess event of 2026, Tata Steel Chess in Wijk aan Zee. A sole winner of the Masters will earn 25.78 points, compared to 27.84 points under the old rules, while in the Challengers the change is starker. The average rating of that event drops from 2613 to 2567.83 with the inclusion of the players ranked ninth to 12th: IM Faustino Oro (2516), GM Bibisara Assaubayeva (2497), IM Carissa Yip (2466), and IM Lu Miaoyi (2431).
A sole winner will now earn 7.46 points instead of 12.43 if only the top eight players were counted. We won’t see the controversial situation we had in 2024 when the winner of the Challengers scored more points than three players who tied for first place in the Masters, though the system still has its quirks. Only players sharing the top five places gain Circuit points in a 14-player event, so the best five players in the Challengers will earn more points than anyone finishing in sole sixth in the Masters.
World Championship Runner-Up No Longer Gets A Significant Boost
It used to be the case that the loser of the world championship match automatically gained a spot in the next FIDE Candidates, but that was stopped in 2024 when GM Ding Liren lost to Gukesh. Instead he was given a boost in the FIDE Circuit. A score of 20.32 was calculated based on his performance of 2754, and then that was doubled to give 40.64.
That score smashed the next highest score of 28.78 for Carlsen winning Norway Chess (despite a 0.9 multiplier for a six-player event), and GM Anish Giri‘s 28.41 for winning the FIDE Grand Swiss. Ding chose not to use that as a launchpad, however, and didn’t play a single classical game since the match, so that he’s now officially become an inactive player and disappeared from the rating list. (Chinese chess journalist Liang Ziming notes Ding was scheduled to play a match against GM Shakhriyar Mamedyarov in November 2025 that would have kept him active, but the match was postponed).
Now, however, the loser of the match will see their score multiplied by 1.5, which would have meant 30.48 for Ding—still the highest score of the year, but only marginally. It’s arguable whether than one decent score (assuming a good performance in the match) will compensate for the missed opportunity of playing in other events while preparing for, or recovering from, the match.
Total Chess Tour Counts But Penalized For Rapid And Blitz
A major new event in 2026-7 will be the Total Chess World Championship Tour, a series organized by Norway Chess and FIDE to crown a separate world champion in a combination of classical (“fast classic”), rapid, and blitz chess. 16 of the 24 qualifiers for the pilot event in October 2026 have already been announced, and since that includes the current top 12 the winner could potentially earn the current maximum possible score of 30.11.
That won’t be the case, however, since to take account of the rapid and blitz element the event has a multiplier of 0.8, cutting that score to 24.09. Only five players from the 24-player event will gain Circuit points.
The FIDE Circuit will provide three of the 24 qualifiers for the pilot event (based on September 1, 2026 standings), and another two for the first leg in 2027 (based on January 1, 2027 standings). There is, however, a twist!
New Open Circuit Added
The qualifiers for the Total Chess World Championship Tour will be determined not based on the overall Circuit but a new Open Circuit leaderboard that only counts events with 50+ players. That addresses the criticism of the current circuit that it’s heavily weighted toward players who gain invitations to smaller closed events. FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich comments, “The new FIDE Open Circuit allows all grandmasters to compete for direct spots in the most prestigious FIDE tournaments.”
In 2025 Giri would have topped that ranking with his 50.6 points including victory in the Sharjah Masters and Grand Swiss, while Circuit winner Praggnanandhaa scored only 8.44 points from 50+ player events.
What do you think of the new system? Let us know in the comments below!
