Candidates Match

The Candidates Tournament is a chess tournament organized by the world chess federation FIDE since 1950, as the final contest to determine the challenger for the World Chess Championship. The winner of the Candidates earns the right to a match for the World Championship against the incumbent World Champion. The last FIDE World Chess Candidates tournament took place in Moscow, Russia from 10 to 30 of March, 2016.

In the early history, it was contested as a triennial tournament, but after the split of the World Championship in the early 1990s, followed with the changes in the determination of the World Champion Challenger, the tournament is held on a variable time basis.

The number of players in the tournament varied over the years, between eight and fifteen players. Most of these qualified from Interzonal tournaments, though some gained direct entry without having to play the Interzonal.

The first Interzonal/Candidates World Championship cycle began in 1948. Before 1965, the tournament was organized in a round-robin format. From 1965 on, the tournament was played as knockout matches, spread over several months. In 1995–1996, the defending FIDE champion (Anatoly Karpov) also entered the Candidates, in the semi-finals, so the winner was the FIDE world champion.

FIDE discontinued the Candidates Tournaments after 1996, though they have returned in a different form for the FIDE World Chess Championship 2007.

During its 1993 to 2006 split from FIDE, the "Classical" World Championship also held three Candidates Tournaments (in 1994–1995, 1998 and 2002) under a different sponsor and a different format each time. In one of these cases (Alexei Shirov in 1998) no title match eventuated, under disputed circumstances (see Classical World Chess Championship 2000).

The tables below show the qualifiers and results for all interzonal, Candidates and world championship tournaments. Players shown bracketed in italics (Bondarevsky, Euwe, Fine and Reshevsky in 1950, Botvinnik in 1965, Fischer in 1977, Carlsen in 2011) qualified for the Candidates or were seeded in the Candidates, but did not play. Players shown in italics with an asterisk (Stein* in 1962 and again in 1965, and Bronstein* in 1965) were excluded from the Candidates by a rule limiting the number of players from one country. Players listed after players in italics (Flohr in 1950, Geller in 1965, Spassky in 1977, Grischuk in 2011) only qualified due to the non-participation (withdrawal) of the bracketed players.

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