Chess Olympiad 2026 Standings and Results

Updated 25 September 2026 at 11:01 PM IST, after round 9

Standings

Open and Women's tables from chess-results.com. Teams are ranked on match points: two for a won match, one for a 2-2 tie. Positions among teams on equal match points follow the official tie-breaks. Teams level on every tie-break share a position.

Full tables with every tie-break: Open and Women on chess-results.com.

India's results

Board-by-board results are on chess-results.com: Open and Women.

Dates and venue

Edition

46th FIDE Chess Olympiad

Dates

15 to 27 September 2026; round 1 on 16 September, round 11 on 27 September

Venue

Silk Road International Exhibition Centre, Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Round times

3 pm Samarkand (3:30 pm IST); round 11 at 11 am (11:30 am IST)

Format

11 rounds of Swiss team pairings, four boards per match

Teams

A record 400: 208 open, 192 women, 1,971 players

Time control

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

Top seeds

United States (2751) in the open event, India (2466) in the women's event

Defending champions

India, in both events

Watch

Free on FIDE's YouTube and Twitch channels; live games on the official site

The strongest entries in the open event are the United States with Fabiano Caruana and Wesley So, defending champions India with world champion D Gukesh on board four, hosts Uzbekistan with world title challenger Javokhir Sindarov on board one, and China with Wei Yi and Ding Liren. Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura are not playing, and there is no Russian team. In the women's event India, with Koneru Humpy back on board one, is seeded ahead of Georgia, Kazakhstan and China.

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.

Schedule in IST

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, and the 11 am start of the last round is 11:30 am IST and 6 am UTC. FIDE published the round schedule on 31 August 2026; the times of the opening and closing ceremonies are still to be confirmed.

Format and time control

Each federation enters five players and fields four of them per round; the fifth rests. A match is four games against one other country. The open and the women's events run side by side in the same hall, round for round, with 208 and 192 teams. As hosts, Uzbekistan field three teams in the open event; their second team is seeded 32nd.

Pairings are Swiss: after each round, teams on the same score meet, so nobody plays everybody and a top seed can still draw a small federation in round 1, which is where the early upsets come from. 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. Ivan Syrovy is the chief arbiter.

FIDE published the line-ups and board orders in August 2026. Until captains submit a fixed board order, chess-results.com lists each team in descending rating order. 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.

Teams and seeds

The top five seeds of the open event by average rating, with the squads FIDE announced in August 2026:

The Netherlands (2683), Azerbaijan (2665, captained by Teimour Radjabov), Hungary (2658) and Armenia (2639) complete the top nine, with France tenth. 21 of the 32 players rated above 2700 are playing. Magnus Carlsen sits this one out, and so do Hikaru Nakamura and Alireza Firouzja; Russia is absent for the third Olympiad in a row.

The top five seeds of the women's event on the September rating list:

Ukraine (2396), Azerbaijan (2375), France (2374), Poland (2369) and Germany (2359) complete the top ten. European women's champion Anastasiia Hnatyshyn leads Ukraine on board one, ahead of former world champion Anna Ushenina. Ju Wenjun, Lei Tingjie, Tan Zhongyi and Hou Yifan are all absent, so only three of the world's top ten women play.

Watch the lower boards and the smaller federations too. Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, the youngest player ever to pass 2700 and now rated 2716, leads Turkey on board one; Faustino Oro, the second-youngest grandmaster in history, makes his debut for Argentina; Bodhana Sivanandan, the youngest girl to earn an IM norm, leads England's women in her second Olympiad. At the other end, Pia Cramling plays her 15th Olympiad for Sweden alongside her daughter Anna Cramling, Alexei Shirov his 14th for Spain, and Vasyl Ivanchuk, Michael Adams, Peter Leko and Ding Liren are all back at a classical board.

India's squads

The open squad, in board order: Arjun Erigaisi (2759), R Praggnanandhaa (2750), Nihal Sarin (2718), D Gukesh (2703) and Vidit Gujrathi (2697), with Srinath Narayanan as captain. Four of the five won gold in Budapest; Nihal replaces Pentala Harikrishna. The board order follows rating, which moves Gukesh from board one in 2024 to board four, so a normal India-Uzbekistan line-up does not put him against Sindarov, who plays board one. Praggnanandhaa arrives from a win at Norway Chess in June.

The women's squad, in board order: Koneru Humpy (2509), Divya Deshmukh (2490), R Vaishali (2469), Vantika Agrawal (2395) and Savitha Shri B (2382), with Swayams Mishra as captain. Humpy returns on board one after missing Budapest. Divya is the Women's World Cup champion; Vaishali won the 2026 Women's Candidates, which makes her the challenger for the women's world title, and she won the Women's Grand Swiss in Samarkand in September 2025. Divya and Vantika return as the board-three and board-four gold medallists of 2024. Harika Dronavalli and Tania Sachdev are not in the squad.

History is against a repeat. No team has defended the open title since Armenia won in 2006 and 2008, and the last five editions had four different winners: China in 2014 and 2018, the United States in 2016, Uzbekistan in 2022 and India in 2024. No women's champion has defended since China in 2016 and 2018.

What happened in 2024

Budapest 2024 gave India its first Olympiad team golds, and it took two. The open team won ten matches, drew one and lost none, 21 match points of a possible 22, four points clear of the United States and Uzbekistan. 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.

The women's team took gold ahead of Kazakhstan, with the United States third, and Divya Deshmukh and Vantika Agrawal won the individual golds on boards three and four. Only the Soviet Union and China had won both events in the same year before, and no country had done it since China in 2018.

How the scoring works

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; a loss pays nothing. The table is ordered on match points, so a narrow win counts exactly as much as a 4-0 sweep, and a team that keeps saving lost positions on board four can matter as much as its top board.

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; FIDE publishes the exact tie-break order for each Olympiad in its regulations. In the last rounds that makes a leading team's medal depend on results elsewhere in the hall. Players also compete for individual board medals; in 2024 Gukesh took the board-one gold with 9 of 10 at a 3056 performance rating.

Where to watch

• —Official stream: FIDE streams every round free on its YouTube channel and on Twitch, with Peter Svidler, Cristian Chirila and Shahzod Vakhidov on commentary.
• —Live games: pairings, results and every board move by move on the official site.
• —Tables: full standings with every tie-break on chess-results.com: Open and Women.
• —Times: rounds 1 to 10 at 3:30 pm IST (10 am UTC), round 11 at 11:30 am IST (6 am UTC).
• —In Samarkand: the city also hosts the 3rd FIDE Chess Olympiad for People with Disabilities from 10 to 18 September, with a record 41 teams, and the 97th FIDE Congress, which elects the FIDE president during the Olympiad; the candidates are Timur Turlov, Wadim Rosenstein and Jan Henric Buettner.

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