The FIDE Women's Candidates Tournament 2024 was an eight-player chess tournament held to determine the challenger for the Women's World Chess Championship 2025. It was held from 3 April to 22 April 2024 in Toronto, Canada, alongside the Candidates Tournament 2024.
It was a double round-robin tournament. Tan Zhongyi won the tournament and played in the Women's World Chess Championship 2025 against the defending Women's World Chess Champion Ju Wenjun.
The eight players who qualified were:
The tournament was an eight-player, double round-robin tournament, meaning there were 14 rounds with each player facing the others twice: once with the black pieces and once with the white pieces. The tournament winner qualified to play Ju Wenjun for the Women's World Chess Championship 2025.
Players from the same federation were required to play each other in the first rounds of each half to avoid collusion. The players affected in the 2024 Women's Candidates were Kateryna Lagno and Aleksandra Goryachkina representing FIDE, Lei Tingjie and Tan Zhongyi representing China, and R Vaishali and Koneru Humpy representing India. They faced each other in rounds 1 and 8.
In March 2024, FIDE announced pairings for the tournament.
The time control was 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, then 30 minutes for the rest of the game, plus a 30-second increment per move starting from move 1. Players received 1 point for a win, ý point for a draw and 0 points for a loss.
Tiebreaks for the first place would have been addressed as follows:
Ties for places other than first were broken by, in order: (1) SonnebornâÂÂBerger score; (2) total number of wins; (3) head-to-head score among tied players; (4) drawing of lots.
The prize money was â¬24,000 for first place, â¬18,000 for second place, and â¬12,000 for third place (with players on the same number of points sharing prize money, irrespective of tie-breaks), plus â¬1,750 per half-point for every player, for a total prize pool of â¬250,000.
Tan Zhongyi led from start to finish to win the tournament. She was the only player who won in the first round (against Lei Tingjie), and when she won again in the second round, she built up a lead over her rivals. In the first half of the tournament Aleksandra Goryachkina kept pace with Tan, but Tan stayed half a point ahead. A momentous round 8 saw Lei - who had won in rounds 6 and 7 - win a third consecutive game against Tan. This led to a three-way tie for first. However, Tan won again in round 9, while Goryachkina lost in round 10 to fall behind. By round 12, only Tan and Lei were still in with a realistic chance. When Lei lost to Vaishali in round 13, Tan was effectively champion. A draw in the final round gave Tan the tournament victory, with a 1.5-point margin.
For the other competitors, Muzychuk achieved several winning positions, but she did not manage to win them, and she finished the tournament as the only player who did not win a game. Salimova, the only non-grandmaster in the field (Vaishali was a GM-elect), also had a difficult tournament, finishing joint-last with Muzychuk. Humpy started the tournament poorly with losses in rounds 4 and 6, but recovered in the second half to finish on +1. Vaishali had an even more turbulent tournament, at one point losing four games in a row to be solidly last, but then winning five consecutive games at the end to tie for 2nd-4th.
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<small>Tie-breakers for first place: (1) results in tie-break games for first place;</small>
<small>Tie breakers for non-first place: (1) results in tie-break games for first place, if any; (2) SonnebornâÂÂBerger score (SB); (3) total number of wins; (4) head-to-head score among tied players; (5) drawing of lots.</small>
<small>Note: Numbers in the crosstable in a white background indicate the result playing the respective opponent with the white pieces (black pieces if on a black background). This does not give information which of the two games was played in the first half of the tournament, and which in the second.</small></onlyinclude>
This table shows each player's cumulative difference between their number of wins and losses after each round. Green backgrounds indicate the player(s) with the highest score after each round. Red backgrounds indicate player(s) who could no longer win the tournament after each round.
First named player is white. 1âÂÂ0 indicates a white win, 0âÂÂ1 indicates a black win, and ýâÂÂý indicates a draw. Numbers in parentheses show players' scores prior to the round. Final column indicates opening played, sourced from Lichess.