GMs Lei Tingjie and Koneru Humpy struck first in their 2025 FIDE Women’s World Cup quarterfinal matches. Humpy’s win over IM Song Yuxin was convincing if bumpy at times, while Lei confessed she played “pretty horribly” before turning things around. The end was unusual, as GM Nana Dzagnidze lost on time in a position where both players thought 40 moves had been made. Elsewhere IM Divya Deshmukh and GM Harika Dronavalli made a quiet draw, while GM Vaishali Rameshbabu spoiled a big edge against GM Tan Zhongyi but held a 72-move draw.
Game two of the Quarterfinals is on Sunday, July 20, starting at 7 a.m. ET / 13:00 CEST / 4:30 p.m. IST.
Women’s World Cup Quarterfinal Results
| Fed | Player | Rtg | – | Fed | Player | Rating | G1 | G2 | TB |
| GM Nana Dzagnidze | 2505 | – | GM Lei Tingjie | 2552 | 0-1 | . | . | ||
| GM Humpy Koneru | 2543 | – | IM Song Yuxin | 2410 | 1-0 | . | . | ||
| GM Vaishali Rameshbabu | 2481 | – | GM Tan Zhongyi | 2546 | ½-½ | . | . | ||
| IM Divya Deshmukh | 2463 | – | GM Harika Dronavalli | 2483 | ½-½ | . | . |
Humpy’s Risk Pays Off Vs. Song
Humpy soon found herself half an hour behind against 19-year-old Song and had some doubts about the razor-sharp Neo-Catalan position that appeared on the board. She said afterward:
I wasn’t pretty sure whether to play this position because she played quite fast in the opening and it seemed she’s very well-prepared and these positions are quite new to me, so I kind of hesitated, but then I decided to take the risk!
The risk was rewarded, as soon Humpy established a huge advantage. 18…0-0?! instead of defending the e6-pawn was played to silicon screams. Song wasn’t the first player to make that mistake, but she met the same fate as the others as White grabbed the pawn and went on to win.
That was far from the end of the story, however. Humpy missed a beautiful knockout blow and Song got chances, before in the end Humpy wrapped up an impressive win. That’s our Game of the Day, which GM Rafael Leitao analyzes below.
Humpy has one foot in the Semifinals, and if she can make a draw or better in the next game her opponent may well be Lei, who took down Dzagnidze.
Lei Turns Tables Before Dzagnidze Loses On Time
Lei was refreshingly honest in her assessment of a game where she got into huge trouble in the opening only to turn things around and even win:
I think today I played quite horribly, but somehow in the middlegame I think she made some mistakes, but the position was very complicated. If you ask me right now, I still don’t understand how this game went!
If you ask me right now, I still don’t understand how this game went!
—Lei Tingjie
If there were chess mysteries on the board, there was also a mystery at the end of the game. After playing her 39th move 39…Qb3 with under three minutes on her clock, Lei drank some water and got up from the board, visibly relaxing. Then shortly after, she looked puzzled.
She’d seen that the live board in the venue was showing 39 moves. She explained:
When I finished the move 39…Qb3 and thought maybe I can go to bathroom, but I wanted to go check, and when I checked I already see 3, 2, 1 and the 39 moves. I was like, what happened? I also asked the arbiter how many moves we have on the board, but she didn’t respond to me also, and later on she played 40.Qf4 and I think the live board shows 40 moves and I claimed to the arbiter. If the situation happens like this, shouldn’t the clock be 0.00?
Dzagnidze sat there quietly calculating sure in the knowledge that she’d reached move 40, but it turned out she’d missed the line for the 20th move on her scoresheet (as you can see in the screenshot from the live broadcast above). Lei said she’d accidentally recorded her 20th move twice, which was why both players had reached move 40 on the scoresheet.
It was a puzzling shared hallucination, and the times shown on the clocks compounded the confusion, though in pure chess terms it likely made no difference. As Lei put it, “The position is completely winning for me and this dramatic ending, I feel sorry for her, but what can I say?”
Let’s take a look at the game from the moment Lei spent 37 minutes on the less-than-advisable novelty 8…b6?!.
Dzagnidze now faces the tough task of winning on demand with the black pieces.
A Short And A Long Draw
The one relatively uneventful draw of the day was in the all-Indian clash between Divya and Harika, which never really caught fire before ending in 31 moves.
Vaishali-Tan, meanwhile, was the longest game of the day at 72 moves, though most of the real action came early, when Tan’s 17…b5? ran into 18.dxc5 dxc5 19.Qc2! and Black was losing a pawn.
Soon Tan was giving up another, but when Vaishali didn’t stop it the counterplay won Black an exchange and nominal winning chances. The position was equal, however, as the players proved, so that their match is level going into the second day.
Stakes will be high on Sunday when players can again be knocked out on the brink of reaching the Semifinals—and getting tantalisingly close to the three spots on offer in the FIDE Women’s Candidates Tournament.
How to watch?
The 2025 FIDE Women’s World Cup takes place at the Grand Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Batumi, Georgia. It is a 107-player tournament with a single-elimination knockout format and a classical time control of 90 minutes for the first 40 moves and 30 minutes for the rest of the game, plus a 30-second increment per move from the first move. Each round consists of two games at the classical time control followed by a tiebreak in faster time controls in case the scores are tied.
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