Something Historic Is Happening in Chess Right Now

Here’s what’s going on. We’re five rounds into the Candidates Tournament, the 14-round event that will decide who gets to challenge Gukesh in the World Championship, and Javokhir Sindarov, the 20-year-old Uzbek GM, is currently leading the field with 4.5 points out of 5.

That means he’s won four games and drawn a fifth. Two of those wins were over Fabiano Caruana, who is in clear second-place with 3.5 points, and Hikaru Nakamura. Caruana and Nakamura are the highest-rated players in the world not named Magnus Carlsen… and Sindarov just beat Nakamura with the black pieces. He also beat Praggnanandhaa in round 3 with Black just two games after Pragg delivered an essentially perfect performance in a win over Anish Giri, who then went on to deliver an essentially perfect performance of his own in week four against Andrey Esipenko.

This is ridiculous. You want to know just how ridiculous it is?

In 2024, the leaders through five rounds, Ian Nepomniatchi and Gukesh, both had 3.5 out of 5 points. Gukesh would go on to win, obviously.

How about 2022? Nepomniatchi had 3.5 again, and he would go on to win that one. 2020? Nepomniatchi again, again with 3.5. 2018? Fabiano Caruana, who had 3.5 and would go on to win. 2016? Eventual winner Sergey Karjakin with 3.5. 2014? Eventual winner Viswanathan Anand with, you guessed it, 3.5.

Even Magnus Carlsen, whose sole Candidates in 2013 launched him into his run as world champion, only managed 3.5 points through five rounds. (At the time, Carlsen was 22 — one year older than Sindarov.)

2013 was the first year that the Candidates took the form it does today, meaning that we’ve already covered the full history of the event, six tournaments. In none of those previous tournaments did a player manage even four points through five rounds, much less 4.5. Through five weeks, the leader or leaders always had 3.5, and every single time, one of the players with 3.5 went on to win.

I mean… probably? There’s a lot of chess still to be played, and by beating Matthias Bluebaum today, Caruana kept himself within striking distance. Meanwhile, Giri and Pragg both have 2.5. Hilariously, the only player to manage a draw against Sindarov so far is Bluebaum, who is tied with Esipenko for the honor of being the tournament’s lowest-rated player. Bluebaum had Black, too!

Right now, Polymarket has Sindarov with a 67 percent chance to win the tournament. Caruana has 29 percent. Pragg has 3 percent, and Giri has 2 percent. That’s how much of a blowout this is. We’re barely more than a third of the way through and the guy already has a 67% chance of winning. Six players combined have a 4% chance.

You’ve got to feel for Fabi: in any other year, his 3.5 would be enough to put him on track for a victory. The fact that Sindarov beat him makes it even more amazing. If they’d drawn, then both players would be standing at four points, better than anyone else had ever managed up to that point in the tournament’s history.

Here’s the X-factor, though. This is Fabi’s fifth-straight Candidates. He’s won the tournament before. And it’s Sindarov’s first. Could the pressure get to Sindarov? It’s certainly possible. Could Fabi’s experience win out? Maybe!

But, like… if Sindarov draws every single one of his remaining games, he’ll end up with 9 out of 14. There’s only been one Candidates tournament where 9 wasn’t good enough to win. It’s not like his unbelievable form is totally new, either. Sindarov won the World Cup just a few months ago, then placed second at Tata Steel, another big tournament, without losing a single game.

So I wouldn’t necessarily advise anyone to bet on Fabi right now, even with the 29 percent odds. What we might get to see, though, is a lot of players playing very dynamic, risky chess, since the only way to catch Sindarov is going to be to win a bunch of games, some of them against Sindarov himself. Caruana, Giri, and Pragg have already shown a willingness to play for the win, and I can’t imagine they’ll back down from that now.

If you want a really good breakdown of Sindarov’s play, I’d suggest Levy Rozman’s recap videos: you can jump to Sindarov’s game in each one.

Not so fast, cowboy! Sindarov is obviously really, really good, and he’s been really, really good for a while: when he became a grandmaster at the tender age of 12 years, 10 months, and 8 days, he was the second-youngest player to ever reach that level. (Since then, Abhimanyu Mishra, Gukesh, and Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş have been faster.) He first crossed 2700 over two years ago. And his World Cup win shows that this Candidates performance isn’t a fluke. He’s clearly elite.

But let’s say he wins the Candidates. The next task will be to beat Gukesh in the World Championship. He’d certainly be capable of winning that match. Ever since Norway Chess 2025, which ended in June 2025, Gukesh has been… not great. He placed 41st at the 2025 Grand Swiss. He lost in round three of the World Cup to world #85 Frederik Svane. And at Tata Steel, he came in 10th. He’s down 55 rating points over the last year.

However, Ding Liren almost beat Gukesh in the last World Championship after looking like a shell of his former self since he’d first won the title. That match exists on a different plane of reality, with different demands and different dynamics, and there’s no guarantee that Sindarov will win even if Gukesh doesn’t appear to recover his form before then. Let’s also remember that Gukesh hasn’t even turned 20 yet — his birthday is next month.

This is the strange and unique nature of chess. If you’re the World Champion, then you stay the World Champion until someone beats you in the World Championship, no matter how badly you play in between.

That’s what’s different about Magnus. Magnus crossed 2800 in November 2009… and he’s never dropped below that rating since. He passed 2820 before he even became World Champion, and he stayed above that mark during the 10 years he held the title. He’s been the world number-one since 2011.

“Dominant” is an understatement. He’s been without parallel. There hasn’t been a Peyton Manning to his Brady, or a Rafael Nadal to his Novak Djokovic. I’m still pretty new to following top-level chess, so I’d defer to a more experienced observer to weigh in on whether there’s been even a Steph Curry or Kevin Durant to his Lebron, or a Rory McIlroy to his Scottie Scheffler… I’ve tortured this metaphor long enough.

So if you want to even be mentioned in the same sentence as Magnus, you need to get above 2800 and stay there as you successfully defend your World Championship, preferably more than once. That’s the bar that Magnus has set, and in contemporary chess, no one else has even come close.

Now, Sindarov is still doing something remarkable, and it poses an interesting contrast to the narrative that would take hold if Fabi won. If Fabiano Caruana makes a comeback, wins the Candidates, and then beats Gukesh, it will cement him as one of the great chess players in history, a perennial contender who finally managed to climb to the top of the mountain. But by the time he’d become champion, he’d be 34, right about the end of a chess player’s peak.

A Caruana title would establish Fabi as the second-best player of his generation. He still wouldn’t be the Manning to Magnus’ Brady, though. In this metaphor, I think Fabi is Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees? Russell Wilson?

If Sindarov wins, on the other hand, then it will crystallize the post-Magnus era of chess. Instead of one figure dominating at the top, we’ll have two 20-year-old World Champions still active who aren’t even indisputably the best players from their own countries. (Uzebekistan also has Nodirbek Abdusattorov, and India has Pragg, Arjun Erigaisi, and Nihal Sarin — all of whom are under 22.)

And how about the 14-year-old Turkish GM Erdoğmuş, who is currently the world’s 38th-ranked player? Or Andy Woodward, the American GM who, at 15, has cracked the top 100? Or Alireza Firouzja and Hans Niemann, who are also still just 22, even though it feels like they’ve been around forever?

Regardless of whether Sindarov peaks with this tournament or continues to soar past 2800, we’re entering a very fun era of professional chess, one that, as I just wrote about, is proving to refreshingly different than the staid, draw-oriented game that people feared was coming. And the fact that Magnus is still there, looming above it all as the top-rated player, just makes it even more interesting.

So stay tuned! Tomorrow is round six, with Sindarov playing Black against Wei Yi and Fabiano getting the white pieces against Esipenko. I don’t know that you can go so far as to say it’s a must-win for Fabi, but it would certainly be nice to beat one of the most beatable players in the tournament. Sindarov’s confidence must be off the charts right now, so we’ll see if he goes for the throat against Wei, who has made some serious mistakes in the tourney so far. He’s played for the win with Black so far, so I don’t necessarily expect that to stop now.