Total Chess in Budapest: the format explained

The field

The 24 players are Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, R. Praggnanandhaa, Vincent Keymer, Alireza Firouzja, Anish Giri, Arjun Erigaisi, Jan-Krzysztof Duda, Le Quang Liem, Levon Aronian, Richard Rapport, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Jorden van Foreest, Hans Niemann, Haik Martirosyan, Vladislav Artemiev, Abhimanyu Mishra, Andrew Hong, Bibisara Assaubayeva and R. Vaishali.

Three Indians: Pragg, Arjun and Vaishali. The venue is the Anantara New York Palace Hotel, the building that also houses the New York Cafe.

The format:

Before the four questions, here is the whole event in one minute. It is eleven days long, it has three stages that happen one after the other, and every player plays on all of the days. Nobody is eliminated at any point: the 24 players who start on the 10th are all still playing on the 20th.

1. Day one, 10 November: the Blitz Swiss. All 24 players play a nine-round Swiss at 3+2. It carries no points and no prize money. Its only job is to produce a ranking that is used later: for tiebreaks in the groups, for seeding the knockouts and for choosing colours.

2. Days two to six, 11 to 15 November: the group stage. Four groups of six, drawn by lot, each a double round robin at Fast Classic (45 minutes plus 30 seconds a move). Two games a day, ten games per player, scored 3 for a win, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loss. The 16th is a rest day.

3. Days eight to eleven, 17 to 20 November: the knockouts. Your finishing position in the group sends you to one of six knockout brackets of four. The four group winners go to Knockout 1 and play for the title; the four who came second go to Knockout 2 and play for places 5 to 8, and so on down to Knockout 6. Every bracket has two semifinals, a final and a third-place match, so all 24 places are decided. Each match is played over two days at all three time controls.

That is the skeleton.

Question 1: What are the time controls?

There are three disciplines, and the increment runs from move one in all of them.

Fast Classic is the new name you will hear most. It is a classical-style game compressed into roughly two hours, so that two of them fit into a single day. There is a fourth time control, the Armageddon, which only appears if a knockout match is level after two days: 10 minutes for White, 7 for Black, with a 1-second increment that only starts from move 41. Black has draw odds.

Two small rules that belong here. In the Fast Classic games no draw can be agreed before both players have made 30 moves; there is no such restriction in rapid, blitz or Armageddon. And the default time of 15 minutes applies only to the classic games. A player who turns up late for a blitz or rapid game is not penalised.

Question 2: Why does the day 1 blitz matter?

On the 10th of November, after the opening ceremony, all 24 players sit down for a nine-round Swiss at 3+2. This is the part that confuses people most, because the blitz tournament has no points of its own in the event, no prize money of its own, and nobody wins anything on day one.

What it does is settle three things that matter a great deal later:

1. It is the tiebreak for the group stage. The groups are ranked on points, and if two players finish level, the one who finished higher in the Blitz Swiss is ranked higher. There is no Sonneborn-Berger, no head-to-head, no number of wins. Just the blitz rank. A group placing decides which knockout bracket you enter, so a good blitz day could be the difference between playing for the title and playing for fifth place.

2. It seeds the knockout semifinals. In every bracket the four players are ordered by their blitz rank and paired 1 against 4 and 2 against 3. So the group winner with the best blitz finish meets the group winner with the worst blitz finish.

3. It decides who picks the colours. In each knockout match the higher-ranked player in the blitz chooses the colour for the first blitz game on day one. All the other games then alternate.

Ties within the Blitz Swiss itself are broken by Buchholz, then performance rating, then the drawing of lots.

A worked example. Suppose Pragg and Carlsen end up in the same group and both finish on 19 points. Pragg wins the group if he placed higher in Monday's blitz, and Carlsen drops to Knockout 2. That is how much is riding on nine quick games before the "real" tournament has started.

Question 3: How are the groups made?

The four groups of six are drawn by lot at the opening ceremony on the 10th of November, before the first group games. There is one rule in the draw: the top four players by standard rating are placed in different groups. On the ratings shown by Total Chess as of the 8th of November those four are Carlsen (2823), Caruana (2783), Abdusattorov (2772) and So (2771).

Everyone else can land anywhere. Pragg, fifth on the standard list at 2763, could be drawn into Carlsen's group or into Caruana's. The blitz results play no part in the draw; the only seeding is the rating rule above.

Days two to six: the group stage

From the 11th to the 15th of November each group plays a double round robin at Fast Classic: two games a day, five days, ten games per player, each opponent faced once with White and once with Black.

The scoring is 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss. This changes how you read a crosstable. Under normal scoring, a player who draws all ten games (5.0/10) finishes ahead of one who wins four and loses six (4.0/10). Here the drawer has 10 points and the fighter has 12, and the fighter finishes higher. A draw is still not worthless, but two draws are no longer the same as a win and a loss: they are 2 points against 3.

At the end of the five days every group has a ranking from first to sixth, with the blitz rank breaking any ties. The 16th of November is a rest day.

Question 4: Group winners go to the semifinals. What about the rest?

Everybody keeps playing. The group stage does not eliminate anyone; it sorts the 24 players into six knockout brackets of four.

Each bracket runs exactly like a mini tournament: two semifinals on the 17th and 18th, then a final and a third-place match on the 19th and 20th. So on the final two days there are twelve matches going on, not one. The four group winners contest the title in Knockout 1, and only the winner of that final is the winner of the Budapest Pilot. But the player who came last in Group C is still at the board on the 20th of November, playing a two-day match for 21st place.

Why fight for 21st place? Because every place has its own prize. First is USD 80,000, second 50,000, third 45,000, fourth 40,000, and then the list runs down in steps to USD 10,000 for 24th. Winning the Knockout 6 final is worth USD 13,000 instead of 11,000. The full table is at the end of this article.

For the full Tour that starts in 2027, each place also carries tour points: 30 for winning Knockout 1, down to 3 for finishing last in Knockout 6. In Budapest there is no Grand Final, so the points table is only the ranking. The organisers have said the three winners of the pilot earn a place in the first leg of 2027.

How a knockout match works

Every match in every bracket uses the same two-day system. Each day has seven games in a fixed order: four blitz games, then two rapid games, then one Fast Classic game. The games are worth very different amounts.

Read the table again, because this is the heart of the format. One win in the Fast Classic game is worth as much as winning all four blitz games twice over. It is also worth two rapid wins. A player can be swept 4-0 in the blitz, draw both rapid games and still take the day by winning the classic: 0 + 4 + 8 = 12 against 4 + 4 + 0 = 8.

The points decide a day winner, and then the scores reset to zero for day two. The match is won by taking both days, or by winning one day while the other is drawn. If the players split the days, or both days are tied, an Armageddon game on day two decides it. The player with more total points across the two days chooses their colour in the Armageddon; if even that is equal, there is a bidding for it.

A worked example. On day one, Arjun wins the blitz 3-1, the rapid games are shared one each (4-4) and the classic is drawn (4-4): Arjun 11, opponent 9, day one to Arjun. On day two the blitz is 2-2, the rapid is 4-4 and the opponent wins the classic: opponent 14, Arjun 6, day two to the opponent. One day each, so it goes to Armageddon. Over the two days the opponent has 23 points to Arjun's 17, so the opponent picks the colour. Note that one classic win on day two did all of that.

Between games there is a break of at least 3 minutes in blitz and at least 10 minutes in rapid and classic if the previous game runs long.

The schedule at a glance

• 10 Nov: opening ceremony, group draw, nine-round Blitz Swiss

• 11 to 15 Nov: group stage, two Fast Classic games a day

• 16 Nov: rest day

• 17 and 18 Nov: knockout semifinals in all six brackets

• 19 and 20 Nov: finals and third-place matches in all six brackets

• 20 Nov: the Budapest Pilot champion is crowned

The bigger picture

Budapest is a pilot. The full Total Chess World Championship Tour is planned from March 2027 with several tournaments a year, the top four on combined points going into a Grand Final, and the winner crowned FIDE World Combined Champion. The organisers have already said the Grand Final rules may change based on what they learn here. In other words, the players in Budapest are testing the format as much as competing in it.

ChessBase India is among the official broadcasters of the event, alongside DAZN, NDTV, Chess.com, TV2 Norway, the Total Chess YouTube channel and Instagram. The official commentary team is Anna Rudolf, Fiona Steil-Antoni, David Howell and Jovanka Houska, with Levy Rozman hosting a highlight show.

Prize fund (USD)