The miracle of Cyprus: R Vaishali wins Women’s Candidates after dramatic finale | Chess News

This was the second time both Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali were competing in the Candidates tournaments. After five rounds in the 14-round event, Vaishali was in last spot along with Divya Deshmukh and Tan Zhongyi. The kind of tournament Vaishali has had since then can be illustrated by the fact that while both Divya and Tan ended the event as the bottom two, Vaishali shot to the top of the standings.

Vaishali’s remarkable resurgence is not unexpected. At the Candidates tournament in Toronto two years ago, she had lost four games in a row to find herself last in the standings after nine rounds. Then, she had bounced back by winning her final five games in a row which almost saw her win the whole thing.

While many grandmasters had named Pragg as one of the favourites in the open Candidates tournament, Vaishali was not a pre-tournament favourite in the women’s event, that’s being played parallely. Five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand, while making his tier-list predictions before the event for Chess.com, had only named Vaishali as one of the three ‘dark horses’ with him rating the chances of five other players ahead of her.

The Candidates triumph is the third big-ticket tournament Vaishali has won in the past three years: the 24-year-old has won the treacherous FIDE Grand Swiss tournament—twice!—besides also being part of the Women’s Olympiad triumph in 2024. But unlike the other events, Vaishali won this event in a thrilling photo finish on the final day.

Vaishali had led the standings since round 8, where she was sharing the lead with four others. One round later the herd at the top got pruned to two players: Vaishali and Zhu. After Round 10, Vaishali held the sole lead of the tournament, but she lost to Zhu in Round 12 to go back to sharing the lead.

Heading into the final round, Vaishali was tied on points at the top of the eight-player standings with Kazakh star Bibisara Assaubayeva. Vaishali needed to win (or at least not lose) her final game against Kateryna Lagno and hope that compatriot Divya Deshmukh would be able to draw or defeat Bibisara in their final round clash. Had both Vaishali and Bibisara slipped up, Chinese rising star Zhu Jiner was also snapping at their heels, just half a point behind.

Even though both Vaishali and Bibisara were level on points coming into the final round, the tournament situation was in favour of the Kazakh. That’s because Lagno, Vaishali’s opponent in the final round, had a reason to chase victory against her: a win would keep Lagno’s own slim hopes of winning the title alive. But Bibisara’s final round rival, Divya, was in the last spot in the standings and has been in wretched form in the past week, losing four of her last five games.

Some chess nerds, diving head-first into the rabbit hole of permutations and combinations, also figured out a way where five players could end Wednesday tied for first place and return to the board on Thursday for a tie-break. For that to happen, the Anna Muzychuk vs Zhu Jiner game had to end in a draw, while Aleksandra Goryachkina had to beat Tan Zhongyi, and overnight leaders Vaishali and Bibisara would both have to lose their games. If the contest went into tiebreaks, it would mean another day of fighting, in the faster time controls.

But as Wednesday wore on, things fell neatly in place for Vaishali.

Divya shrugged off her woeful form of the past week to hold the tournament leader to a draw. In fact, there was a point where Divya had a slick tactic on move 26 with her knight which would have led to an unshakeable advantage for the Indian. But with Divya under pressure on the clock at that stage, she missed the tactic and allowed Bibisara to escape. The game ended as a draw which gave Vaishali control over her own fate.