2025 Women’s World Cup Finals Game 2: Tan Finishes 3rd With Black Win
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GM Tan Zhongyi won with the black pieces against GM Lei Tingjie to finish in third place at the 2025 FIDE Women’s World Cup. She qualifies for the 2026 FIDE Women’s Candidates and earns a $25,000 prize. The match for first place, between IM Divya Deshmukh and GM Koneru Humpy, will go to tiebreaks after an accurate draw.
The Finals tiebreaks start three hours earlier than the regular schedule. They will be on Monday, July 28, starting at 4 a.m. ET / 10:00 CEST / 1:30 p.m. IST.
Women’s World Cup Finals Results
One match is over and only one match remains.
You can see the prize breakdown below:
Humpy ½-½ Divya
Compared to the firefight in game one, we saw a calmer encounter in game two. Humpy started with 1.Nf3 d5 2.e3, something that’s lately been called the Keymer Variation of the Reti Opening. For 16 moves, the players followed a top-level game, GM Hikaru Nakamura vs. GM Magnus Carlsen, Chess.com Classic 2025, where White had two bishops against two knights.
The all-Indian final match is deadlocked after two classical games. Photo: Anna Shtourman/FIDE.
The four rooks got traded, and then a pair of minor pieces. Divya never gave a chance. But just like on the previous day, when Divya attempted to continue the fight with 30.Kh2, she attempted the double-edged 24…g6 (24…Nd4 would have been simpler), temporarily holding onto the pawn at the cost of weakened dark squares. Equal still means equal, and the players reached the logical result one way or another.
Divya answered several questions in her interview. About yesterday, she said, “I was quite disappointed with the first game obviously because I saw everything and I just always ended up making the wrong choice and it was quite a pity.” She added, “Even though it was a draw, it kind of felt like a loss,” and game two was about recovering from that.
I was quite disappointed with the first game.
—Divya Deshmukh
She said today was “considerably easier” and “I think I got myself into a mess for no reason. I was trying to see if there was a win, but I missed this …Qb8 [on move 26]… it should have been an easy draw.” She acknowledged that she often keeps the game going, even when the decision is unsound, a tendency World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju also had in his title match against GM Ding Liren, concluding, “This has often led me to quite a few wins but also quite a few losses.”
Finally, if Divya wins this match she will automatically earn the grandmaster title without the need for norms or the rating requirement. How does she deal with the pressure? “I just tell myself that I have the rest of my life to be sad about it, so don’t be sad today and we can be sad about it afterwards.” If she loses the match, she will still walk away with her first GM norm.
I just tell myself that I have the rest of my life to be sad about it.
—Divya Deshmukh
Divya observed the other match during her game. Photo: Anna Shtourman/FIDE.
Lei 0-1 Tan
After winning the knockout in 2017 (then, it was the Women’s World Chess Championship), Tan reached the World Cup Semifinals in the three editions that followed. In 2021 she finished third, in 2023 fourth, and now in 2025 third again. Curiously, this year she won all six matches in the event only in the classical portion, without a single tiebreak.
After several weeks of play, we saw nerves and exhaustion play a critical role for both sides, but Tan outlasted her opponent in the roughly five-hour struggle.
Tan managed to avoid tiebreaks altogether. Photo: Anna Shtourman/FIDE.
In an Italian Game, Lei sacrificed a pawn in the opening, saddling Black with a wrecked pawn structure. But later it was Black who gave the pawn back—and gave another pawn after that—to gain time and generate threats against the king. Those threats indeed materialized, though only briefly as Lei landed in a lost position but just as quickly wriggled out of it after the miss 35…Rxe4?.
The game isn’t over till the scoresheets are signed, however. The show went on and, following best play, Lei emerged with a knight and two pawns for the exchange—queens still on the board. With three minutes left, she had to find the only move 48.Qf5 to survive with an eventual perpetual check, but 48.Qd5? gave Tan the second chance she needed. Up the exchange, she converted flawlessly and with a stunning final move. GM Rafael Leitao goes over the full Game of the Day below. (It will be added soon.)
All that’s left is the match for first place, and we are guaranteed to have plenty of action in the tiebreaks on Monday. Remember, it starts three hours early!
How to watch?
You can follow the 2025 FIDE Women’s World Cup games on our Events Page. You can watch live commentary on the FIDE YouTube channel.
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.
