Arjun Erigaisi becomes first Indian chess player to qualify for Esports World Cup 2025
Arjun Erigaisi became the first Indian chess player to confirm his qualification for the upcoming Esports World Cup (EWC) 2025 through the second leg of the Champions Chess Tour. After finishing fourth in a field of 118 players in the Play-in Swiss stage with 7.0/9, he chose Daniil Dubov as his opponent for the next round, which was Match Play.
The EWC 2025 will be played in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Earlier, Slovenia's Vladimir Fedoseev won the nine-round Swiss, which had a time control of 10+0.
Arjun beat Dubov 2.0 with both White and Black pieces in the two-legged Match Play, ensuring his qualification for the EWC after qualifying for the Playoffs round. Praggnanandhaa also finished on equal points as Arjun in the Swiss format before taking on the USA's Grigoriy Oparin in the Match Play round. The Superbet Chess Classic winner, Pragg, handed Oparin a 1.5-0.5 loss in the Match Play before losing the Playoffs round to former World Champion China's Ding Liren.
Arjun was also one of the first players to join an Esports organisation. He signed the deal with Gen.G. Earlier, Nihal Sarin and Aravindh Chithambaram also signed contracts with the Indian Esports organisation S8UL.
The reigning World Champion, D. Gukesh, who was invited directly to the Playoffs stage, made a quick exit after losing to Fedoseev in the very first round of the winners' bracket. He then lost to compatriot Arjun in the loser's bracket as well.
Apart from Arjun, Jan Krzysztof Duda, Magnus Carlsen, Ian Nepomniachtchi, and Hikaru Nakamura have confirmed their qualification. As far as Indians are concerned, no one apart from Arjun has yet qualified for EWC.
The top 12 players from CCT will be joined by four players through a 'Last Chance Qualifier' (LCQ) event, which will be played closer to EWC to make a total of 16 players who will be in action at the finale in Saudi Arabia later this year.
Arjun reached the semifinals of the first CCT event — 2025 Chessable Masters — to gain 40 crucial points in the overall leaderboard, and his knockout qualification in the 2025 Chess.com Classic helped him to get enough points to stay in the top 12.
The Esports World Cup will be an event where the world's biggest esports clubs compete across 24 of the most popular esports titles. For the first time, the World Cup will also feature chess, which will be played online.
The first edition of the Esports World Cup was held in 2024 and saw teams compete over eight weeks.
The Esports World Cup 2025 is set to be the largest multi-title esports event in history which is expected to have at least 2,000 players and 200 teams competing for a combined prize pool of $70 million (approx. Rs 602 crore).
Champions Chess Tour is an online chess event that started in 2020 and was named the Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour. The $1 million prize pool Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour had four super tournaments, and the winners of each tournament played in the finals for the prize money. The event evolved over time, with a lot of invitations being handed out and qualification paths created to make it a more open tournament where anyone can have a shot at playing the tournament. The standard four tournaments with one final set-up continued till 2024 before it was tweaked to accommodate the qualification path for the Esports World Cup 2025.
This time, only two legs will be played in the Champions Chess Tour 2025 instead of four legs, with the Esports World Cup acting as a replacement for the Tour Finals of CCT. 12 players will qualify for the EWC from these two online events.
The CCT has three stages:
A Qualifier will have nine rounds in a Swiss system that any non-Grandmaster-titled player can complete, and the top three advance to the Play-In.
In the Play-In, the top three players from the Qualifier meet Grandmaster-titled players, where they play another nine rounds of the Swiss format tournament. 1 player, who finished on top of the standings, directly advances to the Playoffs, whereas players ranked 2nd to 15th move to Match Play.
In the seven two-round matches in the Match Play, players ranked second to eighth choose their opponents from the bottom half (9th to 15th) for a face-off. The seven winners move to the Playoffs.
The seven winners from Match Play and the topper of Play-In are joined by 8 invited players to play in the Playoffs round, a double-elimination bracket event. The winner's bracket will have four games per round, whereas the losers' bracket will have two.
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