Total Chess Fills Its 24-Player Field With Six More Signings

The Total Chess World Championship Tour has completed its 24-player field for its Budapest pilot event, adding Levon Aronian, Liem Le, Jorden van Foreest, Abhimanyu Mishra, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov and Andrew Hong to a lineup already headlined by World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen and World No. 3 Fabiano Caruana. The pilot runs November 10 to 20, 2026, at the Anantara New York Palace Budapest Hotel in Hungary.

This is a business story before it’s a sporting one. FIDE has approved a format conceived by Norway Chess that fuses Fast Classic, Rapid and Blitz into a single championship, explicitly designed, in the organizers’ own words, “to elevate the sport’s commercial appeal and fan engagement” and “make chess one of the world’s most engaging and commercially sustainable sports.”

That’s a different pitch than a classical world title defense. It’s a made-for-broadcast product being test-driven before a full global season launches in 2027.

The Budapest field is deep enough to make the pitch credible. Ranked by September 2026 FIDE standard rating, the top half runs: Carlsen (No. 1), Caruana (No. 3), Wesley So (No. 5), Vincent Keymer (No. 6), Nodirbek Abdusattorov (No. 7), R Praggnanandhaa (No. 8), Arjun Erigaisi (No. 9), Anish Giri (No. 10), Alireza Firouzja (No. 11), and Jan-Krzysztof Duda (No. 13).

The rest of the field: Liem Le (No. 18), Richard Rapport (No. 19), Levon Aronian (No. 20), Hans Moke Niemann (No. 21), Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (No. 22), Ian Nepomniachtchi (No. 23), Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (No. 24), Jorden van Foreest (No. 30), Haik M. Martirosyan (No. 50), Vladislav Artemiev (No. 65), Abhimanyu Mishra (No. 96, the world’s youngest grandmaster), and Andrew Hong (No. 152).

Two women complete the field: Bibisara Assaubayeva (Women’s World No. 5) and Vaishali Rameshbabu (Women’s World No. 16).

The format itself is the real bet. The 24 players open in a group stage of four groups of six, playing a double round-robin over five days: ten Fast Classic games per group (45 minutes plus a 30-second increment), three points for a win and one for a draw. A separate nine-round Blitz Swiss, held before the competition, sets tie-break rankings going into the group stage.

From there, players move into knockout brackets seeded by their finishing positions. Each knockout match spans two days and tests all three disciplines: four Blitz games at 3+2, two Rapid games at 15+10, and one Fast Classic game at 45+30, with weighted scoring that rewards results in the longer time controls. A tied match goes to Armageddon, so nothing is left drawn at the finish.

The top four across the Tour advance to a Grand Final with semifinals and a championship match to crown the inaugural FIDE World Combined Champion.

Aronian, one of the more experienced additions to the field, framed the appeal of testing three disciplines at once: “Bringing Fast Classic, Rapid and Blitz together creates a very different challenge for players. I’m looking forward to seeing how the Total Chess World Championship Tour develops and what it can bring to the future of elite chess.”

Total Chess CEO Kjell Madland leaned into the same commercial framing when discussing the six new signings. “Their experience, personalities and different approaches to the game reflect exactly what Total Chess is about,” he said, calling Budapest “an important first step as we build towards the global tour in 2027.”

The money question is where this gets interesting. Elite chess has seen a wave of new financial backers and formats chasing broadcast-friendly products lately, from sponsorship deals like Freedom Holding’s recent arrival as a FIDE world title backer to combined-format experiments elsewhere on the calendar.

Total Chess is betting that a single champion crowned across three time controls, rather than one classical title defended every few years, is the version fans and sponsors will actually pay to follow. Budapest is where that theory gets its first real test, four premier events and a full 2027 season away from proving anything.