LaviChess

How do you become world chess champion?

You win a match against the reigning world champion. To play it, you first have to win the Candidates Tournament, and you get there through a few selected events in the years before or by having the highest average rating over a set period.

Wilhelm Steinitz

Wilhelm Steinitz

The first. Showed that patience can beat wild attacks.

Mikhail Botvinnik

Mikhail Botvinnik

The engineer who made chess a science. Champion three times.

The road to the match

This is how the eight players reached the 2026 Candidates Tournament, under FIDE's regulations for it.

SpotsHowWho
1Winner of the FIDE Circuit 2024Fabiano Caruana
2First and second in the Grand Swiss 2025Anish Giri and Matthias Blübaum
3The top three in the World Cup 2025Javokhir Sindarov, Wei Yi, and Andrey Esipenko
1Winner of the FIDE Circuit 2025Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa
1Highest average rating, August 2025–January 2026Hikaru Nakamura

The 2025 World Cup was a knockout with 206 players and two-game matches.

The loser of the last title match, Ding Liren, didn't get a spot of his own this time.

The Candidates

The eight play each other twice, once with White and once with Black. Whoever wins the tournament becomes the challenger. In 2026 that was Javokhir Sindarov of Uzbekistan. More under What is the Candidates Tournament?

The match

These are the rules for the 2026 title match between Gukesh Dommaraju and Javokhir Sindarov in Geneva.

Gamesat most 14; the first to 7½ points wins
Time control120 minutes for the first 40 moves, then 30 more minutes, with 30 seconds a move from move 41
If tiedfour games at 15 minutes + 10 seconds a move, then two at 10 minutes + 5 seconds and two at 3 minutes + 2 seconds; if it's still tied, games at 3 minutes + 2 seconds are played one at a time until someone wins
Prize fund$2.5 million; each game won earns $200,000, and the rest is split equally

The schedule, the score, and every game are on the page about the 2026 World Championship.

In the old days

The first official World Championship match was played in 1886, when Wilhelm Steinitz beat Johannes Zukertort. For a long time after that there was no system. Anyone who wanted to challenge the champion had to negotiate with him personally and raise the money for the match.

When the champion Alexander Alekhine died in 1946, there was no champion left to challenge. So FIDE organized a tournament in 1948, in The Hague and Moscow, in which five players met each other five times. Mikhail Botvinnik won with 14 points out of 20. FIDE has run the title fight ever since. Only from 1993 to 2006 were there two world champions at once, one within FIDE and one outside it.

For women

The women's world title has its own road, with its own Candidates Tournament. Vaishali Rameshbabu of India won it in April 2026, and she will challenge Ju Wenjun. More under Who is the world chess champion?

Sources

  • FIDE: Regulations for the FIDE Candidates Tournament 2026 (articles 2.1, 4.1, 4.2)
  • FIDE: Regulations for the FIDE World Cup 2025 (articles 2.1, 4.1)
  • FIDE, September 14, 2026: Salesforce FIDE World Championship Match 2026: schedule, format and prize fund confirmed
  • FIDE, January 5, 2026: on the players in the 2026 Candidates Tournaments
  • Wikipedia: Candidates Tournament 2026; World Chess Championship; World Chess Championship 1948
  • FIDE Open Chess Museum: Bulletin of the 1948 World Championship Tournament; FIDE, April 10, 2020: Candidates 1950: Where it all began
  • The player pages on this site and their sources (Steinitz, Botvinnik, Sindarov, Ju Wenjun)

The facts on this page come from the sources above and, where possible, were checked across several sources. Where the sources disagree, we say less or say what each one says. A number that is an estimate says whose it is, and a counted number comes with its date.

The photos:

Updated November 14, 2026