FIDE and the Spanish Chess Federation have opened registration for the FIDE World Youth Chess Championships, inviting national federations to send players in six age categories: Under-7, Under-9, Under-11, Under-13, Under-15, and Under-17. The event will be held in Roquetas de Mar, a Mediterranean resort town on Spain’s Costa de Almería in Andalusia, with players arriving October 13 and departing October 21, 2026.
That run of odd numbers, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, is the detail worth pausing on. For as long as most parents scheduling flights for this event have been alive, FIDE’s youth pyramid ran on even numbers: U8, U10, U12, U14, U16, U18. That structure dates back decades. The Under-16 Cadet category traces its roots to an unofficial 1974 event in France, recognized by FIDE a few years later, while the Under-14 championship began in 1979 and the Under-8 wasn’t added until 2006.
In 2015 or 2016 (sources differ on the exact year), FIDE split that six-tier ladder in two, creating a separate World Cadets Chess Championship for U8, U10, and U12 and keeping the World Youth Chess Championship for U14, U16, and U18. Now the federation has effectively rebuilt the ladder from scratch under new numbering, and the change isn’t cosmetic. It folds in what used to be a distinct event: the World School Championship, which is being discontinued as a standalone competition and absorbed into this new U7-U17 format.
Meanwhile, the youngest tier, U8-U12, has been spun off again into its own cycle paired with a World Cup, giving young players a qualifying event before the championship proper. FIDE has also renamed the World Cadet Championship U8-U12 into the FIDE World Cadets Cup U8-U12, a qualifying event, with the FIDE World Cadets Championships U8, U10, and U12 later in the year deciding the actual titles. Two overlapping reorganizations, arriving close together, tell you FIDE’s youth calendar has become crowded enough that the federation felt it needed a cleanup.
The mechanics for Roquetas de Mar itself follow patterns familiar to anyone who has tracked these championships before. Under FIDE’s handbook rules for this event, every member federation has the right to send one player per category with board and lodging covered, and that free slot is meant to go first to the previous year’s medalists or continental champions from that federation, if they choose to accept it. Federations can send additional players beyond that at their own expense, and time controls for the championship follow FIDE’s standard formats: 60 minutes per player plus a 30-second increment from move one, or a faster 45-minutes-plus-increment option.
Why rename the brackets at all instead of just merging the calendars? Odd-numbered ages sidestep any confusion with the newly separate U8-U12 cadet cycle, which keeps its even numbers, and they let FIDE draw a clean line between “cadets” and “youth” competitors without the two systems bleeding into each other on paper. It’s a bureaucratic fix, but a sensible one: youth chess has expanded enormously since the 1970s, when a handful of European federations ran informal cadet events, to a global calendar of continental and world age-group events with parallel cups, cycles, and now overlapping renumbered tiers. Roquetas de Mar becomes the first stop where the new map gets tested for real, with Spain’s warm October climate as the backdrop for what is, underneath the rebrand, still the same idea FIDE has run since the 1970s: find the best kids in the world and let them play each other.
Original source: FIDE
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