World Championship match preview

The Women’s World Chess Championship starts on Thursday! Ju Wenjun vs. Tan Zhongyi 2! This is the big one for Ju Wenjun. If she wins the match, she will tie the modern record for most World Championship titles with five, set by Georgian legends Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze. Standing in her way is Tan Zhongyi, who has been World Champion before, but is trying to win a World Championship match for the very first time!

Match posters. Credit: FIDE / Anna Shtourman.

How did Tan Zhongyi get here?

Almost a year ago exactly, FIDE hosted the Candidates and Women’s Candidates together for the first time. The men’s event was won by Gukesh. The Women’s Candidates, expected to be a hotly-contested battle between Aleksandra Goryachkina and Lei Tingjie, in the end was won by Tan Zhongyi! Wait, what? How did she do that?

Tan Zhongyi did not totally come out of nowhere. She was in fact Women’s World Champion already in 2017. But that was when the championship followed the current World Cup knock-out format. Quite different from winning a match, or the Candidates. That was also eight years ago!

Even worse, even though Tan Zhongyi was World Champion, she was never really a top player. Around the time she was champion, she only peaked at No. 7 in the world. That’s good, but there is still a big gap between that and what someone like Ju Wenjun has achieved. If you’re familiar with the elite men’s players, think of Tan Zhongyi as an older version of Jan-Krzysztof Duda. Yeah, he won the World Cup, but he has only peaked at world No. 12. Imagine if does nothing for the next 5 years, then at age 32 finally breaks into the Top 10 and Top 5 and wins the Candidates. That would be insane! Well, that’s what Tan Zhongyi has done.

Just like that, Tan Zhongyi finally made it into the Top 5 last year and then the Top 3. What she has done is particularly insane for women. She is the first woman ever to break into the Top 3 past age 30, and she did it at age 33. The previous oldest someone had done it was only 28.

What’s even more insane is Tan Zhongyi has done it all as a part-time player. When Tan was only 23 years old, she became a coach for her home province Chongqing and a year later, became a coach for the national team. In other words, pretty much everything she achieved since then or around then was as a part-time player. Nowadays, she has her own chess club co-run with her father. In her Candidates post-victory interview, she said she still considers herself a part-time player, and her chess club is her real priority.

Even as a part-time player, Tan Zhongyi found the time to up her game. Perhaps she was sparked by the previous Candidates in 2022 when she upset defending champion Aleksandra Goryachkina, who still seemed like the favourite to repeat at the time, in the semi-final. Several months later, Tan was consummately destroyed in the Candidates final by Lei Tingjie. But maybe getting that close to another World Championship match without really trying was what made her think she could get to that next level if she just put in a bit more effort.

Before Tan Zhongyi won the Candidates last year, she said she came to the realization that it wasn’t too late for her to try to win a World Championship match. She also said she began to put in that concentrated extra effort to try to get there, and it paid off with the Candidates win and the spot in the World Championship match she was aiming for. It didn’t just pay off with that. She also won a few more tournaments after the Candidates, including the Cairns Cup in St. Louis and four tournaments in a row total. Across all 41 games she played in 2024, Tan Zhongyi maintained a performance level above 2600, at 2611 to be exact. That made her the best player in women’s chess last year by a wide margin of nearly 50 points, ahead of who else but Ju Wenjun at No. 2 of course!

Tan Zhongyi with the Candidates trophy. Credit: FIDE / Michal Walusza.

How did Ju Wenjun get here?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that Ju Wenjun is the Women’s World Champion, and has been for quite some time. But you may not remember how Ju Wenjun first won the title. It was by winning a match against Tan Zhongyi in 2018. Now, here they are again, seven years later, vying for the crown yet again.

Even before Ju Wenjun became World Champion, she was already one of the best players in the world. Before she turned 21, she was already 2550 and world No. 6. She reached No. 3 at age 23. In 2016, she won the whole Women’s Grand Prix series to solidify herself as the clear world No. 2 behind only Hou Yifan. As Grand Prix champion, that entitled Ju Wenjun to a spot in the World Championship match against the forthcoming 2017 knock-out World Championship winner, which ended up being Tan Zhongyi. Ju Wenjun won that match by a narrow margin to become World Champion in May 2018 and she hasn’t let go of the crown since.

The craziest defense Ju Wenjun had to do was the first one, when she was forced to defend her title not even six months after she won it. That first defense wasn’t even a match, it was the knock-out World Championship. Amazingly, she won that too, beating Kateryna Lagno in the final. From there, it’s been mostly smooth sailing. Even though she was trailing in her matches against Aleksandra Goryachkina and Lei Tingjie past the halfway point each time, she still was able to figure out how to come from behind and win.

Ju Wenjun has been the de facto world No. 1 for most of the time since Hou Yifan pseudo-retired in 2018/19. Goryachkina surpassed her in-between her 2020 and 2023 matches, but since then, Ju Wenjun has mostly been able to hold on to that de facto No. 1 ranking.

Ju Wenjun with the World Championship trophy. Credit: FIDE / Stev Bonhage.

Head-to-head

Ju Wenjun and Tan Zhongyi have played a lot of games against each other, 50 in classical to be exact! They have faced off in a whole World Championship match of course. At the end of last year, Ju Wenjun beat Tan Zhongyi in the World Rapid. But none of their classical games are actually recent. Their most recent classical games were in 2019, when they played twice in Chinese League, and Ju Wenjun both. Tan Zhongyi hasn’t beaten Ju Wenjun in classical since their last World Championship match seven years ago.

But there is still some hope for Tan Zhongyi. She did win two games in that World Championship match she lost to Ju Wenjun. She was also the one who knocked out Ju Wenjun in the 2017 knock-out World Championship that she went on to win, and she did it in classical with Black. Before that, Tan Zhongyi faced Ju Wenjun in the final of the 1st China Chess Queen knock-out tournament, essentially a Chinese knock-out women’s national championship. She won that match against Ju Wenjun to win the title, although she needed Armageddon to do it and they drew both classical games.

FIDE’s World Championship match graphic from the official website, but I corrected all the mistakes. Credit: FIDE (edited by me).

Why you should root for Ju Wenjun

Ju Wenjun is the Magnus Carlsen of women’s chess right now. She’s been World Champion forever, and No. 1 for a long time. She’s been winning everything across all formats. She’s the reigning World Blitz Champion, and is only the third player ever to complete the career Triple Crown (winning world titles in classical, rapid, & blitz) along with Magnus and Susan Polgar. She only narrowly had to settle for runner-up in the World Rapid Championship. If Ju Wenjun retains her World Championship title this time, it would give her another chance to hold all three crowns at once at the upcoming World Rapid Championship this December. Even online, Ju Wenjun easily won the chess.com Women’s Speed Chess Championship and was the only woman all of last year to score 8.5/11 in Titled Tuesday even though she only played two or three times.

Above all, winning this title would be a historic milestone for Ju Wenjun. In women’s chess, there is one number of World Championships that matters more than any other: five. Since the introduction of the match format in the 1950s, the two most-dominant Women’s World Champions have been Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze, who held the crown back-to-back for 30 years combined. They have been the two longest-reigning champions by far, and they both won the title five times. In the 30+ years since, no one has been able to repeat that amazing feat. Xie Jun and Hou Yifan came the closest with four, but even they didn’t do it with four consecutive titles. Ju Wenjun is the first to win four consecutive titles since Nona and Maia. If she wins this one too, she would finally equal their legacy with five consecutive crowns.

Nona Gaprindashvili (right) and Maia Chiburdanidze (left) both won the modern record of 5 Women’s World Championships. Credit: Amruta Mokal.

Why you should root for Tan Zhongyi

Simply put, Tan Zhongyi is the underdog. No one really expects her to win. That being said, if you just assume her probability of winning is the low percentage of people who are picking her to win, then her chances are probably being underestimated. After all, she did outperform Ju Wenjun last year. And overall, she has a decent head-to-head record against Ju Wenjun, winning a decent number of games. It’s hard to write someone like that off completely.

If Tan Zhongyi wins, it would easily be the longest gap between losing the title and getting it back. There would be no equivalent in chess history, women or men. It would be like George Foreman regaining the heavyweight title in boxing. For a long time, it really seemed like Tan Zhongyi had given up on her career. But now after all those years, she has that belief back. What a great story that would be if she wins.

Ju Wenjun broke ahead of Tan Zhongyi at around 18, but after all these years, Tan has finally caught up. Credit: 2700chess.

What makes this match special

Yeah, it’s China vs. China. And it’s 1991 vs. 1991. But more than that, it’s 1 vs. 2. Ju Wenjun and Tan Zhongyi are clearly the two best players in the world right now. That’s what the World Championship match is supposed to be. If you look at the men’s matches in the last fifteen years or so, that hasn’t really happened a whole lot, and it might not happen again for awhile. On the other hand, since FIDE brought the match format back for the women in 2020, you could make a good case the previous two matches with Ju Wenjun vs. Goryachkina and Lei Tingjie were also between the two best players in the world at the time. All in all, the women battling for the World Championship really are the best in the world.

The other facet of this match of note is that it’s a rematch. That’s quite rare. The only other rematches in women’s chess history are Nona Gaprindashvili beating Alla Kushnir three times in a row, all pretty easily. The next closest thing to a rematch involved the 1956 triagonal match won by Olga Rubtsova between the three champions of the ’50s: Rubtsova, Elisaveta Bykova, and Lyudmila Rudenko. Bykova had beaten Rudenko in 1953 and would beat Rubtsova in 1958, but none of these were really rematches because the 1956 championship wasn’t really a match. Unlike Gaprindashvili and Kushnir where Gaprindashvili was a huge favourite every time, this match between Ju Wenjun and Tan Zhongyi isn’t nearly as clear. It could be the first good rematch in women’s chess history.

World Championship match preview in last year’s World Rapid. Credit: FIDE / Lennart Ootes.

Who will win?

I’m picking Ju Wenjun to complete her bag of five, but I think it should be close. Even if Tan Zhongyi is a better player than Ju Wenjun today, as their performance levels suggest, it’s going to be hard for Tan to overcome Ju Wenjun’s match experience.

If it’s anything like the last match between them, there should be a lot of decisive games. But then again, they are very different players by now, so we’ll see.
If the match is close and ends up going to tiebreaks, Ju Wenjun’s chances go up big time. She definitely has a huge edge over Tan Zhongyi in speed chess. Although in the last match vs Lei Tingjie, the same was true and Ju Wenjun famously did everything she could to avoid tiebreaks, but even that worked out in her favour.

Coverage

You can catch coverage of the match by FIDE, lichess, and chess.com. FIDE has Evgenij Miroshnichenko. Lichess has Jesse February and Toms Kantāns. chess.com has Jovanka Houska and Irene Sukandar, and even Judit Polgar for the first two games only.

The match start time is 3 PM in China (which is 12:30 PM in India, 9 AM Central European Time, 3 AM on US east coast, and 12 AM on US west coast. Only time will tell who will post recap videos.) Game 1 is Thursday, April 3rd. Game 2 is April 4th. Game 3 is April 6th, and so on. There’s a few-day break in the middle for players to travel from Shanghai to Chongqing for the second half of the match. The last game is April 20th.

The match schedule, where weeks are four-days long. Credit: FIDE.

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