A Visual Recap of the 2026 Candidates Tournament

Now that the Candidates tournament is over, I want to take a look at some stats about the tournament, as I’ve done previously for other tournaments.
Note that I'll only cover the open section here (I couldn't add more images to this post), but you can find the same stats about the women's section here.

Open section

Score

The open section was defined by Sindarov’s historic performance, he started with 5 wins in his first 6. The gap between him and the field opened up after he defeated Caruana in round 4, who also started with 2.5 out of 3. After that, he was always at least one full point ahead of the field.

I also like to look at how well every player scored with white and black.

As Sindarov won most of his games in the first half of the tournament, it’s not surprising that he scored the same number of points with white and black. However, this seems to have been a general trend in the tournament.

Time usage

One thing that stood out in Sindarov’s play was the time usage, or rather the lack of it. He played quickly and was ahead on the clock in most games, which may have been particularly impactful since the players played without an increment before move 40.

To get a comparison to other players, I decided to plot the median time advantage of each player after every move in the tournament. I look at the time advantage instead of the total time left, as the time left is more impacted by quick games where both players knew all the theory.

Sindarov is around 25 minutes ahead of his opponents from move 17 to move 40. No other player had any significant median lead on the clock after move 30.

One can also gather some interesting tidbits about other players. Pragg’s decision to spend around a minute before making his first move in every game can be clearly seen. He also had a good time advantage in the early middle game, which may be a sign of good preparation. Wei Yi on the other hand got way behind on the clock and only slowly closed the gap, probably since he needed to speed up to avoid flagging.

Better and worse positions

As usual, I also want to gather a bit more insight into how well the players actually played instead of just looking at the outcomes of the games.

Firstly, I want to look at the relative number of moves where the players stood much better (evaluation of more than +1), slightly better (evaluation between +0.5 and +1), equal (evaluation between -0.5 and +0.5), slightly worse and much worse.

Sindarov stands out here, as he never had to defend a really bad position. Giri also managed to stay out of trouble most of the time, but didn’t get as many good positions as Sindarov. It’s also interesting that Caruana got a lot of good positions, but was also worse for many moves, which may reflect his risk taking in the tournament.

Only looking at evaluations only tells half the story, as players also need to convert their good positions. To get a sense of how well players were converting their advantages, I compared the number of wins each player had to the number of games where they stood better, which means that they had an advantage of +1 or more at least once in a game.

Wei Yi is the only player who managed to convert all games where he stood better into wins, but he just didn’t get enough good positions to challenge for the top places. Sindarov stands out by reaching a better position in half his games and converting almost all of them into full points.

We can also see how well players defended bad positions, by looking at the number of games where they stood worse compared to the number of losses.

Once again, it looks like Wei Yi played a good tournament from a practical viewpoint, as he was worse in 5 games, but managed to save 3 of them. Of course, it’s even better to never be in trouble in the first place and that’s exactly what Sindarov managed to do.

Engine analysis

We can also look at some more classical analytical measures to get an idea of how well the players played.

Let’s start by looking at the number of inaccuracies, mistakes and blunders played by each player.

Again, it’s clear that Sindarov played an amazing tournament. His only blunder was the missed win against Blübaum when he was already far ahead in the tournament.

It’s interesting to see that Esipenko didn’t make many mistakes or blunders despite having a disappointing tournament overall.
We can also look at the accuracy of every player. As the accuracy depends heavily on the position on the board, I compare the accuracy for every player to that of their opponents.
Note that I use my own accuracy metric, which was calibrated using OTB grandmaster games, so the numbers are a bit lower than what you may be used to.

Nakamura had the highest accuracy, probably because he wasn’t too interested in getting complicated, fighting positions in the second half of the tournament.

I always find the difference between the accuracy of a player and the accuracy of their opponents more insightful. When looking at the difference, the two top finishers in Sindarov and Giri stick out.

Openings

Finally, let’s look at the openings played in the open section.

First if all, here is the frequency of the different first moves with white.

I’m surprised to see that only around 30% of the games saw 1.e4, probably because many of the participants wanted to avoid the Petrov.
We can also look at which specific openings were played.

The QGD was by far the most popular opening in this tournament. Interestingly, there wasn’t a single Ruy Lopez and also only one Italian Opening in all 56 games.

I've also covered the women's section on my Substack, but couldn't add more images to the post here. So check out my Substack if you're interested in the women's section.