Chess Olympiad 2026

Dates and venue

Edition

46th FIDE Chess Olympiad

Dates

15 to 27 September 2026, round 1 on the 16th

Venue

Silk Road International Exhibition Centre, Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Format

11 rounds of Swiss, four boards per match

Teams

A record 400: 208 open, 192 women

Time control

90 minutes for 40 moves plus 30, with a 30-second increment

Defending champions

India, in both events

The opening ceremony is on 15 September and play starts the next day. Rounds 1 to 6 run daily from 16 to 21 September, the rest day is 22 September, and rounds 7 to 11 run from 23 to 27 September. Every round starts at 3 pm Samarkand time except the last one, which starts at 11 am on the Sunday; the closing ceremony follows the same day. The open and the women's events play in the same venue, round for round.

For Indian fans the month is stacked: the Global Chess League finishes in Bengaluru on 13 September, two days before the Olympiad opens, and several players go straight from one to the other.

How the Olympiad works

Each country enters five players and fields four of them per round. A match is four games against one other country: every game won is a game point, and the match result is what feeds the table. Win the match 2.5-1.5 or better and the team takes 2 match points; a 2-2 tie pays 1 each. The table is ordered on match points, so a narrow win counts exactly as much as a 4-0 sweep. When teams tie on match points, recent Olympiads, Budapest included, have separated them on Sonneborn-Berger, which weighs each match win by how well the beaten team did.

Eleven rounds of Swiss pairings mean nobody plays everybody: after each round, teams on the same score meet. With 208 teams in the open event a seed can still meet a minnow in round 1, which is where the early upsets come from. The women's event runs the same way with its own 192-team field. The open event is genuinely open; a federation can field anyone in it.

The games are classical: 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, then 30 more for the rest, with 30 seconds added per move from move one. The 2026 regulations also ban agreed draws before Black's 30th move, so a quiet early handshake is off the table. The open winners take the Hamilton-Russell Cup, the women's winners the Vera Menchik Cup, and the best combined result across both events earns the Gaprindashvili Cup.

India's double defence

In Budapest 2024 India did something only the Soviet Union and China had managed before: both golds in the same year. The open team won ten matches, drew one and lost none, 21 match points of a possible 22. D Gukesh scored 9 of 10 on board one at a 3056 performance rating, and Arjun Erigaisi scored 10 of 11 on board three; both took individual golds, as did Divya Deshmukh and Vantika Agrawal in the women's event.

The 2026 open squad keeps four of those five: Erigaisi (2759), R Praggnanandhaa (2750), Gukesh (2703) and Vidit Gujrathi (2697), with Nihal Sarin (2718) coming in. The women's squad is seeded first, and Koneru Humpy (2524) returns on board one with Divya Deshmukh (2490), R Vaishali (2489), Vantika Agrawal and Savitha Shri B behind her.

History is against a repeat. No team has defended the open title since Armenia won in 2006 and 2008, and no women's champion has defended since China in 2016 and 2018.

Teams to watch

These are the top five seeds of the open event by average rating:

In the women's event India (2476 average) is seeded ahead of Georgia (2449), China (2432) with Zhu Jiner (2550) on top board, Kazakhstan (2421) around Bibisara Assaubayeva (2538), and the United States (2413).

Watch the lower boards too. Faustino Oro, 12, plays for Argentina; Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, 15 and already rated 2716, plays for Turkey; Bodhana Sivanandan, 11, plays for England's women. Magnus Carlsen sits this one out, and so do Hikaru Nakamura and Alireza Firouzja. Squads and seedings are as announced by FIDE in August 2026.

Schedule

Eleven rounds in twelve days, with one rest day in the middle. Samarkand is GMT+5, so a 3 pm start is 3:30 pm IST and 10 am UTC.

How to watch

• —Live games: pairings, results and every board move by move on the official site.
• —Broadcast: FIDE streams the rounds with commentary on its YouTube channel, free.
• —In Samarkand: the city also hosts the 3rd FIDE Chess Olympiad for People with Disabilities from 10 to 18 September, and the FIDE Congress from 20 to 27 September, with the FIDE presidential election on the 26th.

If a live game gets sharp, paste its position into the analysis board and work out the tactic before the players do.

Chess Olympiad 2026 FAQ