Women's World Chess Championship 2026

Dates and venue

Champion

Ju Wenjun, China, women's world champion since 2018

Challenger

Vaishali Rameshbabu, India, winner of the 2026 Women's Candidates

Dates

Not announced by FIDE as of 12 September 2026

Venue

Host city not announced; the last three matches split the games between Shanghai and a second city

Format

12 classical games, first to 6.5 points, tiebreak at 6-6

Prize fund

Not published as of 12 September 2026

Last match

Ju Wenjun beat Tan Zhongyi 6.5-2.5 in April 2025 with three games to spare

Organiser

FIDE

The FIDE page for the current women's cycle marks both the dates and the host city as to be announced. The page gives the shape of the match and nothing more: 12 games, a win for the first player on 6.5 points, and a tiebreak if the score is level at the end. It names Ju Wenjun as the reigning champion and the winner of the 2026 Candidates as her challenger. The cycle page is on fide.com.

Ju Wenjun's last three matches all opened in Shanghai, her home city, and moved to a second city for the second half: Vladivostok in 2020, Chongqing in 2023 and Chongqing again in 2025. ESPN's preview of 17 April 2026 raised a Shanghai and Chennai split as one option, because Vaishali is from Chennai. FIDE has said nothing about the venue since the Candidates ended.

The match closes the 2025-2026 women's cycle, which ran through the Women's Grand Prix, the Women's World Cup in Batumi, the Women's Grand Swiss in Samarkand and the Candidates in Cyprus. The open title match, Gukesh against Sindarov, runs in Geneva from 24 November to 12 December 2026 under its own regulations.

Women's World Chess Championship schedule

There is no game calendar yet. As of 12 September 2026 FIDE had not published the dates, the host city or the regulations of the women's match. The day-by-day calendar and the IST start times go on this page as soon as FIDE publishes them.

The 2025 match ran in April 2025 and ended after nine games. Until FIDE speaks, the two players' own calendars are the only fixed points. Vaishali plays board three for India at the Chess Olympiad in Samarkand from 15 to 27 September 2026, and Ju Wenjun is not in China's squad for that event.

Format and tiebreaks

The match has 12 classical games. A player who reaches 6.5 points is champion at once, and the rest of the games are cancelled. A 6-6 score after 12 games sends the title to a tiebreak.

1. 1.Games: 12, at a classical time control. The regulations that set the time control had not appeared as of 12 September 2026.
2. 2.Winning score: 6.5 points. A 6.5-2.5 result after nine games, as in the 2025 match, ends the match early.
3. 3.Tiebreak: played only at 6-6. The cycle page does not say whether the tiebreak is rapid, blitz or both.
4. 4.Draw rules, default rules and the prize split: all in the match regulations, which are still to come.

Ju Wenjun has played this 12-game format in each of her three defences since 2020. The open match in Geneva uses 14 games and a winning score of 7.5, so the women's match is two games shorter.

Ju Wenjun and Vaishali

Ju Wenjun has held the women's world title since 2018 and has won it five times in a row: four matches and one knockout, the 64-player event of 2018. She beat Aleksandra Goryachkina in 2020, Lei Tingjie in 2023 and Tan Zhongyi in 2025, the last one 6.5-2.5 with three games to spare. She plays little classical chess between matches. In 2025 her only classical events were the title match and Norway Chess, where she finished fourth.

On the FIDE list for September 2026 she is second among women on 2553, 43 points behind Hou Yifan. The same list has Vaishali 16th among women on 2469, a gap of 84 points between the two players.

Vaishali Rameshbabu is 24 and plays for India. She is the older sister of Praggnanandhaa, who played the open Candidates at the same venue in Cyprus and scored 6 out of 14. Her coach is RB Ramesh in Chennai. She is the first Indian in the women's title match in 15 years, and this is her first title match. Her first Candidates, in Toronto in 2024, ended in joint second place on 7.5 points; her second ended in first place.

Her form before the cycle was poor by her own account. She told FIDE after the Candidates that she lost a lot of rating in 2025 and that, apart from the Grand Swiss, her results were poor. In August 2025 she scored 1.5 points at the Chennai Grand Masters and nearly skipped the Grand Swiss in Samarkand. She went after her brother and Karthikeyan Murali urged her to, and won it, her second Women's Grand Swiss in a row.

How Vaishali won the 2026 Candidates

The Women's Candidates ran in Cyprus from 28 March to 16 April 2026, at the same venue as the open event: eight players, a double round robin over 14 rounds, and the winner plays Ju Wenjun. Two players came from the 2024-25 Women's Grand Prix, two from the 2025 Women's World Cup, two from the 2025 Women's Grand Swiss and two from the FIDE Women's Events series 2024-25. Vaishali took the Grand Swiss spot, with Kateryna Lagno second in Samarkand and also qualified. FIDE's report on the last round called her the lowest-rated player in the field.

She drew her first four games and lost with Black to Zhu Jiner in round 5, which left her on 2 out of 5. She won four of the next six games: against Lagno in round 6, against Tan Zhongyi in round 7 after a blunder that Tania Sachdev, on commentary, called one of the worst in Candidates history, against Divya Deshmukh in round 9 and against Goryachkina in round 11. A second loss to Zhu Jiner in round 12 and a draw with Tan Zhongyi in round 13 left her level with Bibisara Assaubayeva on 7.5 before the last round.

Round 14, on Wednesday 15 April 2026, gave Vaishali White against Lagno. Assaubayeva drew with Divya Deshmukh on the next board, so a draw would have meant a playoff. Vaishali won instead: a Sicilian Dragon in which she won a pawn in the middlegame, then a rook check on move 39 and a pawn push on move 40 broke the defence before the second time control. FIDE put her accuracy in the game at 96 percent, Viswanathan Anand called her opening a dream, and she called the result 'a dream come true'. The final standings:

• —1. Vaishali Rameshbabu (India): 8.5/14
• —2. Bibisara Assaubayeva (Kazakhstan): 8/14
• —3. Zhu Jiner (China): 7.5/14
• —4. Aleksandra Goryachkina (FIDE): 7.5/14
• —5. Anna Muzychuk (Ukraine): 7/14
• —6. Kateryna Lagno (FIDE): 6.5/14
• —7. Divya Deshmukh (India): 5.5/14
• —8. Tan Zhongyi (China): 5.5/14

Zhu Jiner, the only player to beat Vaishali, finished third, level with Goryachkina. Divya Deshmukh, the Women's World Cup champion, and Tan Zhongyi, the 2025 challenger, shared last place on 5.5. In the open event Javokhir Sindarov won with 10 out of 14 and Praggnanandhaa scored 6. The games are in FIDE's report and chess.com's round 14 report, and ESPN traced the whole run round by round.

Vaishali vs Ju Wenjun head to head

The classical record stands at one win for Ju Wenjun and three draws from four games, by the count in ESPN's preview of 17 April 2026. Their two classical games at Norway Chess Women 2025 ended level, and the Armageddon deciders went one each, both to the player with White. Vaishali's Armageddon win there, in round 8, is her only win over Ju Wenjun in any format.

The rating gap on the September 2026 list is 84 points, and the experience gap is wider: Ju Wenjun has won five title events, and Vaishali has played none. The case for the challenger rests on long events. She has won the last two Women's Grand Swiss tournaments, and at the Candidates she won five of her last nine games after a 2 out of 5 start. The case for the champion is her last defence, which she closed out after nine of the 12 games.

How to watch

• —Official broadcast: FIDE streams its title events on its YouTube channel. As of 12 September 2026 there was no official site for the women's match.
• —Start time in India: not known until FIDE names the host city. We will add the IST start times with the calendar.
• —The Candidates games: the decisive last-round win against Lagno is in FIDE's report and in chess.com's round 14 report, both with analysis.
• —The games themselves: any finished game pastes into the Zapp analysis board as PGN for your own engine check.

Women's World Championship 2026 FAQ

Facts on this page were checked on 12 September 2026 against FIDE's page for the 2025-2026 women's cycle, the reports of FIDE and chess.com on the last round of the Candidates, ESPN's preview of 17 April 2026 and the FIDE rating list for September 2026. The match dates, the host city, the regulations, the time control and the prize fund were unpublished on that date and are marked as such above.