We Built a Prediction Game for the 2026 Candidates Tournament

The 2026 FIDE Candidates Tournament starts tomorrow (March 29) in Pegeia, Cyprus, and it’s going to be one of the most exciting chess events in a long time. Eight of the world’s strongest players competing in the Open section and eight in the Women’s section, all fighting for the right to challenge for the World Championship. 14 rounds of classical chess, spanning nearly three weeks, with a chance at playing for the world championship on the line.

And we built something for it.

Over at Chessalyz.ai, we just launched Candidates Madness 2026, a prediction game that lets you follow along with both the Open and Women’s Candidates tournaments in a way that actually keeps you engaged for the entire event. Think March Madness brackets, but for world-class chess.

How It Works

Before each round begins, you pick the result of every game (White wins, Draw, or Black wins) and predict how many moves long each game will be. Before the tournament even starts, you also make your overall predictions for each section: who wins the tournament, the final standings order, the winning score, the longest game, the shortest decisive game, and the shortest draw.

Points are awarded based on how accurate your predictions turn out to be. For individual games, you get 10 points for correctly predicting the result (win/draw/loss) and up to 5 bonus points for nailing the move count (or getting close). For the overall tournament predictions, you can earn up to 50 points for correctly picking the winner, 5 points for each correct finishing position in the standings, up to 25 points for guessing the exact winning score (or 10 if you’re within half a point), and up to 20 points each for predicting the longest game, shortest decisive game, and shortest draw.

All of this gets tracked on a leaderboard that updates after every round, combining your Open and Women’s section scores together.

The Numbers

Up to 175 points are available for the overall tournament predictions in the Open section, and another 175 for the Women’s section. For each individual round, you can earn up to 60 points per section. Over the course of 14 rounds in each section, the absolute maximum score you can get is 2,030 points if you somehow predict everything perfectly.

You won’t, and I won’t either. But that’s kind of the fun of it.

The Players

If you haven’t been following the qualification drama over the past year, here’s a quick rundown. The Open Candidates features Hikaru Nakamura (2810), Fabiano Caruana (2795), Wei Yi (2754), Anish Giri (2753), Javokhir Sindarov (2745), Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa (2741), Matthias Blübaum (2698), and Andrey Esipenko (2698). The winner will challenge reigning World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju later this year.

The Women’s Candidates features Zhu Jiner (2578), Tan Zhongyi (2535), Aleksandra Goryachkina (2534), Anna Muzychuk (2522, who replaced Koneru Humpy after her withdrawal), Bibisara Assaubayeva (2516), Kateryna Lagno (2508), Divya Deshmukh (2497), and Vaishali Rameshbabu (2470). The winner will challenge reigning Women’s World Champion Ju Wenjun.

Both tournaments are double round-robins, meaning each player faces every other player twice (once with White and once with Black), and both sections run simultaneously in Cyprus from March 29 through April 15, with tiebreakers on April 16 if needed.

Why We Made This

I’ve always felt that watching a long tournament like the Candidates is way more interesting when you have some skin in the game. Not actual money on the line (this is just for fun and bragging rights), but something that makes you care about every single result. When you’ve predicted that Sindarov is going to beat Esipenko in Round 1, suddenly you’re watching that game with a completely different level of attention. You’re invested.

It also forces you to think about chess in a way that most fans don’t usually think about it. How many moves will a game between Caruana and Nakamura actually last? Is this matchup more likely to be a draw or a decisive result? Who do you think will actually overperform their rating? These are fun questions to wrestle with, and they make the viewing experience that much better.

Make Your Picks

Round 1 locks at 8:30 AM ET on March 29, so if you want to get your predictions in, now is the time. Head over to chessalyz.ai/madness, make your tournament predictions, pick your Round 1 games, and see how close you can get over the next three weeks.

How close to 2,030 points can you get? I’m guessing not very close, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Happy predicting!