2027 FIDE Freestyle Chess World Championship: Next qualifying spot will be awarded at the end of June

Hamburg/Weissenhaus (June 4, 2026). The fifth qualification spot for the 2027 FIDE Freestyle Chess World Championship (Open and Women’s) will be determined earlier than originally planned. As Freestyle Chess and FIDE jointly announced on Thursday, the players leading the Open and Women’s divisions of the Freestyle Friday overall standings after the final event on June 26 will each earn a direct qualification spot.

In each of the two competitions of the 2027 FIDE Freestyle Chess World Championship, eight players will compete for the title. So far, four players in the Open category (Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, and Vincent Keymer) and four women (Bibisara Assaubayeva, Harika Dronavalli, Alua Nurman, and Dinara Wagner) have qualified for the title matches at the Weissenhaus Private Nature Luxury Resort in northern Germany.

All other players in the Freestyle Friday Championship will retain the leaderboard points they have accumulated so far and will be able to continue competing for the next World Championship qualification place when the series resumes after the summer break.

The second half of the Freestyle Friday Championship will be played from early October through mid-December 2026 and will determine the sixth qualifier in both the Open and Women’s categories for the World Championship Finals in February 2027.

With these changes to the qualification format, the organizers are responding to the packed chess tournament calendar. “At the same time, we are further enhancing the Freestyle Friday event and ensuring even more excitement on the road to the 2027 World Championship,” says Freestyle Chess CEO Jan Henric Buettner.

The current leaderboard is available here.