Which current women do well in open tournaments?

Nowadays it’s damn near impossible to find any woman or girl who has never competed in open tournaments. Nevertheless, no one really does a good job of tracking who does well in open tournaments like they would with women competing in women’s tournaments. Without anyone doing this, some people still don’t realize women even compete in open tournaments.

In everyone’s defence, it’s not as easy to track. With women’s tournaments, you can just track who is the best based on who wins the top tournaments. With open tournaments, you have women competing in all sorts of different tournaments of different levels, formats (mainly Swiss or round-robin), amounts of players, and numbers of tournaments that they’re competing in. Some tournaments have a bunch of women, others have only just one or two. All these things make it hard to compare one tournament performance to another.

Fortunately, there is a good baseline method that works reasonably well for doing that almost regardless of the kind of tournament: tournament performance rating (TPR). Regardless of the opponents or any other details about a tournament, you can always calculate a player’s TPR based on just two factors: a player’s score and the average rating of their opponents. Just one tournament alone is usually not a good indicator of how good someone is, but a sample of three tournaments (around 30 games or so in total) usually suffices as a good metric for indicating a player’s strength.

With tournament performance rating, we can see once and for all: Who is doing the best at open tournaments right now?

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To answer that question, I made a Top 30 list ranking the top women based on their best performances in open tournaments in the past two years. More specifically, for each player, I compiled a list of their three best performances in open tournaments across 2024 and 2025 based on TPR. I then calculated their combined TPR across all three of those tournaments, and ranked them directly from that metric (labelled in the rankings as TPR+).

The idea is simple: If you have at least a few good performances in open tournaments, you’ll do well on this list. You can also think of it like the FIDE Circuit, except based on performance instead of finishing positions.

Here are the rankings:

Top 30 women’s rankings in open tournaments. Credit: @OnTheQueenside.

Technical notes: The minimum number of games for a tournament to be counted is seven. If a player only had two open tournaments in the last two years, I still included them, but deducted a 10 Elo penalty. If someone only has one open tournament in the past two years, then I counted that as “not competing in open tournaments” and left them off the list. For the combined TPR+ calculation, I raised the rating of the lowest-rated player to 2200 (as is done in GM norm calculations). I also did that for each of the individual TPRs. Also, I think the list is comprehensive, but if you think someone is missing that should be here, let me know and I can check.

Top 10

Just like my general Top 25 rankings for January ’26, Zhu Jiner is No. 1. In fact, six players are Top 10 in both rankings: Zhu Jiner (1 | 1), Ju Wenjun (3 | 2), Divya Deshmukh (2 | 6), Bibisara Assaubayeva (4 | 9), Aleksandra Goryachkina (9 | 3), and Vaishali (10 | 10) — where the player’s spot in this ranking is listed first.

Zhu Jiner and Ju Wenjun were the only players with two 2600+ performances (the main requirement for a GM norm), while Divya Deshmukh was the closest to having three. Bibisara Assaubayeva took a long time to get her final GM norm, but she was reasonably close to 2600+ performances in open tournaments on multiple occasions. Vaishali — who after winning the Women’s Grand Swiss, was asked by someone if she was going to play in open tournaments like Divya in the open Grand Swiss — had a 2673 performance in the Biel Challengers that’s better than any performance Divya or almost anyone else has had in the past few years.

Divya Deshmukh very nearly made GM norms (2600+ performances) at all three of the open tournaments pictured here (‘25 Grand Swiss, ‘24 Grenke Open, ‘24 Sharjah Challengers). Credit: Michał Walusza; Dariusz Gorzinski; Sharjah C&CC.

As for the players more out of the spotlight you might not realize are doing well in open tournaments, look at No. 5 through No. 8 on the list. Polina Shuvalova (No. 6) absolutely dominated open tournaments in 2024. Song Yuxin (No. 8), who excelled at the Women’s World Cup and Women’s Grand Swiss in 2025, also excelled as one of the Top 10 women in open tournaments.

Who is not on the list?

If we compare both rankings (general vs. open), eleven of the general Top 25 are not in the Top 30 of the open rankings. Of those eleven, three are playing in opens, but are further down the list. That leaves 8 top players who are not playing in opens. That may sound like a lot, but keep in mind, of those eight, Hou Yifan is largely retired, while Lei Tingjie really hasn’t played much in general since losing the World Championship match, and Alina Kashlinskaya was on maternity leave during the period relevant for the rankings.

That only leaves 5 players out of the general Top 25 who are really not playing open tournaments: Anna Muzychuk (36), Humpy Koneru (39), Alexandra Kosteniuk (42), Kateryna Lagno (36), and Nana Dzagnidze (39). All of those players are over 35 years old, and all of them played in more open tournaments when they were younger. (Only Judit Polgar has finished 1st at more open tournaments than Humpy, while Kosteniuk has won the open Swiss national championship, and Anna and Nana have both won the top women’s prize in the Gibraltar Masters that used to be the strongest open tournament in the world.)

Humpy won the 2007 Kaupthing Open in Luxembourg, one of no less than 9 open tournaments where she finished first. Credit: Gaston Freymann.

Only on this list

The Top 13 on this list are all in the Top 25 of the general women’s rankings. But the next 15 on the list (No. 14 to No. 28) are not. That includes some of the top juniors you probably have heard of like Lu Miaoyi (16), Xeniya Balabayeva (20), and Eline Roebers (20). It also includes players throughout their 20s still trying to make it as professional players like Oliwia Kiołbasa (26) and Vantika Agrawal (23). Even a few older players like Klaudia Kulon (34) made the list. A lot of the players in this second tier of the rankings — especially the younger ones — tend to play in more open tournaments, hence why they rank high on the list.

The standard

Currently, the standard for excellence in open tournaments is around 2550. Getting just one 2550+ performance already puts you in a club of only about 20 women over the past two years. The real elite standard in women’s chess today is still 2600+ (i.e. making GM norms), something only a little over 10 players have done recently in open tournaments.

Xeniya Balabayeva’s 2550+ performance in the 2024 La Plagne Festival is the most textbook example I can think of an excellent performance in a normal Swiss open tournament. Credit: via X Balabayeva.

Meanwhile, 2500+ performances are not uncommon, but having two 2500+ performances in a span of two years is a similar level of achievement to getting one 2550+ performance. Like the latter achievement, the number of players who have done that is also only about 20.

Beyond the elite level, a 2650+ performance is truly exceptional, as that’s only been done by around 5 players across 2024 and 2025. The absolute exceptional is 2700+, which — ignoring perfect scores — has only been done once in the past two years by the No. 1 player on the list, Zhu Jiner.

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Overall, the answer to the question “Who is doing the best in open tournaments lately?” is a lot of the names you would expect. Zhu Jiner is setting the standard in open tournaments just like she’s doing in women’s tournaments. Both the first and second tiers in the rankings tend to favour younger players more so than in the general women’s Top 25 rankings. In general, the standard for excellence in open tournaments at least for now is around 2550+.

By the time next year rolls around, around half the tournament performances on the list will come off and be replaced the best performances from this year. Will anyone challenge Zhu Jiner at the top? Will the top players even keep their spots? Which of the lower-ranked players will make a breakthrough? You’ll have to stay tuned to find out.

The next featured open tournament is the Biel Challengers Triathlon in July, which this year is split 50-50 with three women (Vaishali, Kosteniuk, and Carissa Yip) and three men (Xiao Tong, Václav Finěk, and Marco Materia).

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