 "R Praggnanandhaa 'third favourite' to win Candidates, feels Magnus Carlsen")
Indian Grandmaster R Praggnanandhaa is the third best player in fray to win next year’s Candidates, believes top-ranked Norwegian Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen. Praggnanandhaa is the only Indian in the list of eight players who will battle it out in the Candidates to get a ticket to the World Championship match against the title holder D Gukesh.
Carlsen put the American duo of Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana as the top favourites to win Candidates and said that Praggnanandhaa too is a good contender. For the other five players, Carlsen said they were not among the frontrunners.
READ | When and where will Candidates Tournament, featuring four Indians, take place next year?
‘Pragg third favourite’
“Just like last time, probably the Americans are the favorites. Then we got Pragg as the third favorite, and then probably a pretty big drop off after that. Wei Yi is really good, but I don’t think he’s capable of winning enough games to win the Candidates. So it will be interesting to see,” Carlsen told Chess.com in a recent interview.
Apart from Nakamura, Caruana and Praggnanandhaa, Netherlands’ Anish Giri, Germany’s Matthias Bluebaum, Uzbekistan’s Javokhir Sindarov, China’s Wei Yi and Russia’s Andrey Esipenko are the other players who will be playing the Candidates.
Carlsen says Keymer, Arjun should’ve been in Candidates
Carlsen also said that FIDE needs to devise a mechanism to get in more big names to play in the Candidates. He pointed out the names of Germany’s Vincent Keymer and India’s Arjun Erigaisi as two big players who deserved to be in the tournament.
“ I would have loved to see some more big names in the field, but then again, if you didn’t qualify, you didn’t qualify. Maybe this system should kind of account for somebody like Vincent Keymer, who was really close to qualifying a lot of times and has the highest rating of anybody who’s not there. He certainly deserved to be there, but I guess he and Arjun and a few others will have to await their returns. It’s always interesting to follow,” Carlsen added.
The 2026 Candidates begins March 28th in Cyprus.
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