FIDE has announced that the 2025 Chess World Cup will be held in Goa, India, between October 30 and November 27, 2025. The World Cup is a biennial knockout tournament that features most of the world’s top players. This year’s event features 206 participants and a prize fund of $2 million.
🔥 The FIDE World Cup 2025 is coming to Goa! 🇮🇳
🗓️ From October 30 to November 27, 2025, the world’s top players will gather on India’s west coast for one of the most exciting chess events.
🎯 Every round is win-or-go-home, making the World Cup one of the most dramatic… pic.twitter.com/Kb4Pp5thln
— International Chess Federation (@FIDE_chess) August 26, 2025
Most participants have already qualified for the World Cup through national championships, continental championships, and other major tournaments over the last two years, although some spots are still not yet claimed. The 50 highest-rated participants will advance straight to the second round of the event, joining the 78 first-round winners for the remaining rounds of knockout matches. Each match consists of two classical games. If a match is tied after two games, then the players compete in rapid, blitz, and armageddon tiebreaks if necessary.
Aside from the prize fund, players are competing for three spots in the 2026 Candidates Tournament, where they will join GM Fabiano Caruana and four other qualifiers, aiming for a world championship match against the reigning champion, GM Gukesh Dommaraju. Although it is a qualifier for the Candidates, Caruana is still eligible to play, as is Gukesh himself.
This year the World Cup is a separate event from the Women’s World Cup, which was held in July and won by GM-elect Divya Deshmukh. That victory earned her the grandmaster title and qualified her for the 2026 Women’s Candidates Tournament.
Past World Cup winners include many of the best players of recent decades: GMs Levon Aronian (twice!), Gata Kamsky, Boris Gelfand, Peter Svidler, Vladimir Kramnik, Sergey Karjakin, Teimour Radjabov, Jan-Krzysztof Duda, and most recently, Magnus Carlsen.
