Ekaterinburg 2020–21 Candidates Tournament

◇A tournament cut in half

The 2020 Candidates began in Yekaterinburg as an eight-player double round-robin — fourteen rounds, fifty-six games, a €500,000 prize fund — with the winner set to challenge Magnus Carlsen. The field was Ian Nepomniachtchi, Fabiano Caruana, Ding Liren, Anish Giri, Alexander Grischuk, Wang Hao, Kirill Alekseenko, and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, who had come in as a replacement after Teimour Radjabov withdrew over pandemic concerns.

It played on even as much of the world shut down, but after seven rounds the situation became untenable: on 26 March 2020, with Russia about to suspend international flights, FIDE stopped the event to get the players home safely. Scores from the first half were retained, and the tournament was left suspended, mid-flight, with Nepomniachtchi and Vachier-Lagrave sharing the lead.

◇Resumed after more than a year

The break went on far longer than anyone expected. Only in April 2021, more than thirteen months later, did the players return to Yekaterinburg to play rounds eight through fourteen. Ding Liren, one of the pre-tournament favorites, had started badly after a long COVID quarantine before the event and couldn't recover, while others had to find their form again a year after the tournament stopped.

Nepomniachtchi picked up where he had left off. He held the lead through the second half and clinched first place with a round to spare, finishing on 8½/14, half a point clear of Vachier-Lagrave. Giri and Caruana shared third on 7½. It was a composed, low-risk performance built on not losing at the wrong moment.

◇Challenger at last

The win made Nepomniachtchi Carlsen's challenger for the 2021 World Championship in Dubai, a title shot he had chased for years. That match started level before Carlsen broke through in a marathon sixth game and pulled away. Even so, Nepomniachtchi had won a Candidates tournament played in conditions no challenger before him had faced.