Can Pragg Be Caught in the FIDE Circuit?

GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu's dramatic come-from-behind win at the UzChess Cup was his third major tournament victory of the year, along with prior wins at Tata Steel and the Superbet Chess Classic. This win expanded his already strong lead in the FIDE Circuit, placing him in the driver’s seat to qualify for the 2026 Candidates Tournament.

In this article, we're going to take a look at how the FIDE Circuit works and how it fits into the world championship cycle. We'll explore what it would take for someone to pass Pragg in the standings before the year is over, and also what would happen to the Circuit race if Pragg qualifies another way in the meantime.

• FIDE Circuit Standings
• How Does This Work?
• So Can Pragg Be Caught?
• What Counts As A Strong Score In An Event?
• Let's Talk About The World Cup And Grand Swiss
• What if Pragg Qualifies Another Way?
• Conclusion

FIDE Circuit Standings

Here are the top ten players in the official standings as of the end of June:

How Does This Work?

To begin with, let's understand what the FIDE Circuit is, and the basics of how these scores are calculated. Any tournament with a strong enough field, based on the eight highest-rated participants, can earn Circuit points for the top finishers. All top finishers earn more points if the event is stronger, and of course higher finishes earn more points. The strongest super-tournaments can offer upwards of 20 points to the winner; only six events have met that threshold so far this year.

The next step is that each player can ultimately add their seven best-qualified tournament results together to generate their total points for the year, and the highest total score wins the Circuit. Winning the Circuit earns a qualifying spot in the Candidates, where the right to challenge GM Gukesh Dommaraju in a world championship match is up for grabs. It gets a lot more complicated, though, when we look at what a "qualified" tournament result actually is. Pragg's current total is listed as being based on four events, but he has actually already earned points in six different tournaments. However, only four of them count.

The most important requirement is that to qualify for the Candidates at all—as well as to include a fifth event in your total score—you must play at least one event with more than 50 participants. To have six or seven events in your final score, you must play two such large tournaments. Pragg has played none so far, meaning he can only count his four best scores at this time.

Of course, he will likely play two very important large events later this year: the World Cup and the Grand Swiss, so it's only a temporary issue. Once he's participated in those, he'll be able to count a fifth closed event, and the points he already earned in Prague, Czechia will become part of his total. Functionally, then, he already has 96 Circuit points today, but it won't show up that way in the standings until the World Cup is over at the end of November (unless he plays a different large event sooner).

So Can Pragg Be Caught?

Absolutely, and the large events are the key. If the final score were just a simple top five, his five events totaling 96 points would be very difficult for anyone to catch. It's within a point of the same score GM Fabiano Caruana had in 2024 from his top five closed tournaments, and those events by themselves would have been enough to lift Caruana to third place in the 2024 Circuit standings. To win it and earn his Candidates berth, however, he had to tack on 33 more points in two large opens. To achieve a high enough score to ultimately win the Circuit, Pragg won't just need to participate in two large events, he'll need to score some significant points in them. And that isn't a guarantee at the World Cup or the Grand Swiss, where there are so many strong players and anyone can slip up. Caruana failed to earn points in the 2023 Grand Swiss, despite otherwise dominating the chess world that year, and in the 2023 World Cup only three of the top eight seeds earned Circuit points.

So to lock up first place, Pragg has some work to do and he has to do it in large events. If he finishes top-six or so in both the World Cup and the Grand Swiss, for 20 or more added points, he would be almost impossible to catch. But if he zeroes one or both of those events, someone else with two strong large-event scores could definitely pass him... provided they also have good marks in closed tournaments. Abdusattorov, currently in second place in the standings, with three strong scores in the books already, would be best positioned to make that push, but it's not too late for others to contend too.

What Counts As A Strong Score In An Event?

To understand how safe Pragg's lead is—or isn't—it helps to see how many points the players chasing him could potentially earn in future events. It is extremely difficult to earn 20+ points from any one event, requiring a top finish in one of the most elite tournaments of the year. And scores above 15 in large events are few and far between, earned only by the winners of the strongest open tournaments. So a score of 130, like Caruana won the 2024 Circuit with, is pushing towards the maximum one might hope for over seven events. Let's look at the 20 highest event scores achieved so far this year:

We can see that, aside from the points awarded to GM Ding Liren for the 2024 World Championship match in lieu of an automatic Candidates spot like those defeated in World Championship matches had previously earned, a score of 20+ is an extraordinary feat that has only happened 10 times this year. And three of those 10 have been by Pragg! Meanwhile, the top large-event score is only 18 points for winning Aeroflot, the world's strongest open tournament so far this year.

Looking ahead on the chess calendar, there are a few events that will clearly offer chances for 20+ point scores, like the Chennai Grand Masters and Sinquefield Cup in August, but there are perhaps fewer such chances than last year, because a large chunk of the calendar is blocked off for most elite players for the Grand Swiss and the World Cup. Those tournaments collectively take a lot of time, and don't offer excellent scoring opportunities to the players who still need points after they're over.

What do we mean by players who still need points?

Let's Talk About The World Cup And Grand Swiss

In terms of qualifying for the Candidates Tournament, which is ultimately the broader theme of this article, these are of course the two most important tournaments of the year. Caruana already qualified for the Candidates by winning the 2024 Circuit, and he will be joined by the top three finishers at the World Cup and the top two finishers at the Grand Swiss, who all qualify directly. Only after the first six players are identified does the 2025 FIDE Circuit come into play, in order to determine the seventh qualifier for the event. The eighth and final qualifier goes to someone via ratings. (As of now, GM Hikaru Nakamura is the strong favorite for that spot.)

Because the Candidates spot from the Circuit goes to the top player in the standings who has not already qualified, you can't earn meaningful Circuit points at either event: Sure, top-two finishers will earn 20+ points, but they won't need them anymore! A number of players who don't qualify directly via the Grand Swiss and World Cup will pick up somewhere in the range of 10 to 18 points for their 3rd-8th finishes. Those are strong large-event scores that will definitely help in the Circuit standings, but it won't really be possible to score 20+ without making your scores irrelevant in the process (a tradeoff every player would of course welcome).

This is why earlier we talked about how to semi-clinch the Circuit, Pragg should be hoping for top-six finishes (and 10+ points) in each of these events. Of course if he does better than that and qualifies directly, his Circuit score will be higher, but it would no longer matter. Which raises another critical question about the Circuit standings.

What if Pragg Qualifies Another Way?

While Pragg has a very commanding lead, particularly if you take for granted the assumption that his 11 points from Prague will eventually be added to his final score, it might not matter. He has that lead because he's been playing brilliantly all year, and it wouldn't be surprising in the least if he made a run in one of the two tournaments that matters most, and earned a Candidates spot directly. In that case, the race for second would become critical, and that race is massively wide open. It's far too early to make any meaningful predictions, beyond noting that GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov currently holds the spot.

With six months left before scores are finalized, and nearly a month and a half of that blocked off for events where nearly every top player will be busy and unable to score 20+ without qualifying directly, time is getting somewhat short for players to add Circuit points. Even getting to seven events isn't a guarantee.

One important point to consider when looking at anyone's chances is that having a strong tournament on the schedule doesn't guarantee strong points. You have to play well too! GM Arjun Erigaisi has played in three of the highest scoring events of the year— Tata Steel, Norway, and UzChess — but he hasn't yet landed high enough in the standings to score even a single Circuit point. So, a player with three events to get to seven by the end of the year may need to sign up for six or seven more tournaments, not just four. That's a lot to ask in the next six months!

Conclusion

The FIDE Circuit standings can be complicated and confusing to analyze. Hopefully we've now given you the tools to track the standings with some decent understanding as the year progresses. We'll certainly be tracking them as well, and any time things change meaningfully we'll be back to break down the updates. Most likely, the next article will come out before the Grand Swiss, after we see summer results. And we'll certainly have an update after the World Cup, when the race to the Candidates is suddenly dramatically clarified, to see who still needs the spot and what their hopes from the Circuit are in the final month. Stay tuned!