World rapid & blitz: Arjun Erigaisi’s narrow path to the Candidates

Bengaluru: While India’s newly crowned world champion soaks in the celebrations, it’s now hustle time for his peers to attempt to fight him for the title two years from now. Leading that pack is India’s highest-ranked player, world No. 4 Arjun Erigaisi.

The 21-year-old is currently placed second on the Fide circuit leaderboard – one of the pathways to qualify for the Candidates. Arjun is six points behind America’s Fabiano Caruana in the Fide circuit and both players will feature in the year-end $1.5 million World rapid and blitz tournament in New York City’s Wall Street, that runs till December 31. Whoever tops the Fide circuit standings will directly qualify for the Candidates – the eight-player tournament that determines who will challenge reigning world champion D Gukesh in the 2026 World Championship match.

Defending champion and top seed Magnus Carlsen, the obvious tournament favourite, picked Arjun among his top five rivals in the event. Arjun has had a stellar year so far – cracking the Elo 2800 club, becoming India’s highest-ranked player and scoring an Olympiad gold on board three with a stunning 10.0/11. Toppling world No. 2 Caruana from the Fide circuit lead in this year-end tournament though might not be an easy task for Arjun. His best chance might rest on having to go as far as winning the rapid event.

World champion Gukesh is taking a well-deserved break and is expected to be back in action at the Tata Steel Chess in Wijk Aan Zee next month.

This year’s event is being touted as one of the strongest tournaments to take place in the USA and will feature the likes of world No. 3 Hikaru Nakamura, Alireza Firouzja, Wesley So, Nodirbek Abdusattorov among others. Carlsen has won the rapid event five times and the blitz event six times, taking home the twin titles in Samarkand last year. Since he relinquished the classical world title, the world rapid and blitz tournament has been among Carlsen’s primary hunting grounds. With Carlsen shifting focus, the tournament has also gained popularity in Norway in recent years.

Apart from Arjun, among the 16 other Indians in the tournament are R Praggnanandhaa, Raunak Sadhwani. Pranav V, Aravindh Chithambaram, Koneru Humpy, Vaishali R, Harika Dronavalli, Divya Deshmukh and Vantika Agrawal.

The Open section will have 13 rounds while 11 rounds will be played in the women’s section for the rapid event. The time control will be 15 minutes with a 10-second increment per move. In blitz stage 1, the women and open sections will have the same number of rounds as in rapid. It will be followed by a knockout stage 2 – where top eight players from each section will advance and play the quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals. The time control for blitz will be 3 minutes with a 2-second increment per move.