GM Fabiano Caruana will have White against his U.S. rival GM Hikaru Nakamura when the 2026 FIDE Candidates Tournament begins in five weeks on March 29. The other first-round pairings are GMs Javokhir Sindarov vs. Andrey Esipenko, Matthias Bluebaum vs. Wei Yi, and Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu vs. Anish Giri. The full pairings of the event to decide GM Gukesh Dommaraju‘s next world championship challenger were revealed at the drawing of lots ceremony held in Cyprus today.
We also got the pairings for the 2026 Women’s Candidates Tournament that decides the next challenger for GM Ju Wenjun. The first round features three clashes between players from the same federation, GMs Divya Deshmukh vs. Koneru Humpy, Aleksandra Goryachkina vs. Kateryna Lagno, and Zhu Jiner vs. Tan Zhongyi. The other match-up is GM Vaishali Rameshbabu vs. GM Bibisara Assaubayeva.
The Candidates Tournament is one of the most eagerly awaited events on the 2026 calendar, with 14 cut-throat rounds set to decide the next world championship challengers—the €1 million ($1.18 million) prize fund is very much secondary! The participants meet each other twice, with White and Black, and the players have been known since the end of 2025 when the rating and FIDE Circuit spots were finalized.
What wasn’t known was the order players would face their rivals, which has now been decided in a ceremony held at the Cap St George’s Hotel & Resort in Cyprus, the same venue where the event will take place. No players were present, with FIDE Vice President Georgios Makropoulos, Cyprus Chess Federation President Criton Tornaritis, Hotel Director Constantinos Malaou, and Chief Arbiter Takis Nikolopoulos conducting the ceremony, which can be watched below.
The drawing of lots, by selecting shells, wasn’t entirely random, since the policy for a number of years now has been for players from the same federation to meet in the first round instead of the last. That’s aimed at preventing collusion at the end of the event, though it has to be said collusion is the last thing we can expect from U.S. stars Caruana and Nakamura, with Nakamura having won five of their last nine classical games.
Nakamura, like Giri, has a tough start, with three Blacks in his first four games, while debutants Sindarov and Bluebaum both get three Whites in the first four rounds.
Here are the round-one pairings, with the games starting at 15:30 local time (8:30 a.m. ET / 14:30 CEST / 7 p.m. IST) on Sunday, March 29.
It’s noteworthy that the Candidates Tournament veterans and debutants are separated in round one, as they face off against each other.
The Women’s Candidates Tournament is once again being held in the same venue at exactly the same time, and the pairings were decided at the same ceremony. In this case, the draw was hugely complicated by the players coming from only four separate federations, so that preventing them from meeting required the pairings to be decided almost by hand.
Divya making her Candidates debut vs. Humpy is an all-Indian repeat of the 2025 FIDE Women’s World Cup final, with Humpy looking for revenge.
Chinese women’s world number-two Zhu makes her debut against former Women’s World Champion Tan, while Goryachkina and Lagno both bid to reach a second world championship final match against Ju. In the one clash of players from different countries, India’s Vaishali plays her second Candidates in a row against the first Kazakh player ever to qualify, Assaubayeva.
As in the Open event, there are players with tougher and easier starts. Divya and Vaishali both have White in three of their first four games, while Lagno and Tan have Black in three of the first four, but over the course of the event everything will be balanced out.
Who are your favorites to earn the challengers’ spots?
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