TWIC is 31. First issue 17th September 1994.FIDE World Cup 2025 (2)
Major surprises in the second round of the FIDE World Cup
Mark Crowther - Thursday 6th November 2025
The playing venue during round 2. Photo © | https://worldcup.fide.com/
The FIDE World Cup takes place in Goa, India, Sat 1st to Wed 26th Nov 2025. The second round concluded today, this round was where the event started in earnest, when the top seeds entered the fray. There has never been a shock winner of this event, but there are always surprise eliminations. Ian Nepomniachtchi, Wesley So and Hans Moke Niemann all would have fancied their chances against anyone, but Diptayan Ghosh, Titas Stremavicius and Lorenzo Lodici all had different ideas. Santosh Gujrathi Vidit had a bit too much for wunderkind Faustino Oro, well known players Vasyl Ivanchuk, David Navara, Ray Robson and Johan-Sebastian Christiansen didn't survive the round either. 128 players started the round, 64 are left.
With so many games it's really hard to settle on a highlight. I'll first look at how the three surprises happened. In the second game Nepomniachtchi got nothing out of the opening against Ghosh and after 15.h3?! things went downhill very fast. Stremavicius got a quick and very nasty edge against Wesley So from a London System, and this soon became decisive, that wasn't the end of the story, the game continued for a long whilte and the final position where So resigned is drawn according to the engines, So was still a piece for two pawns down, but something had changed. Niemann was defending an unpleasant endgame of Bishop and two Pawns vs his Rook in the first rapid tie-break game and 72.Rg3 or 72.Rg3 drew, his move 72.Rg1 lost.
Praggnanandhaa only advanced after 6 tie-break games, 5-3 against Tumur Kuybokarov, Daniil Dubov also progressed defeating Jinshi Bai 4-2. Michael Adams managed to outlast Ivan Cheparinov to go through after 10 games, Rasmus Svane beat Rauf Mamedov in an Armageddon (I thought the Armageddon was in game 9 not 11 so had this result wrong).
World Champion Gukesh progressed without any need for tie-breaks, as did Anish Giri, Arjun Erigaisi, Vincent Keymer and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. It was also nice to see Peter Leko reach the third round, he doesn't play that much these days, he has a stern test coming up against Kirill Alekseenko.
Pentala Harikrishna beat Arseniy Nesterov in the second game with a beautiful, although known, Queen sacrifice in what was problably the game of the round.
Round 3 pairings 7th-9th Nov 2025: D Gukesh-F Svane, S Sargsyan-M Yilmaz, Y Yu-S. L. Narayanan, N Theodorou-J Sindarov, S Mamedyarov-N Grandelius, D Dardha-H Pentala, J van Foreest-A Sarana, J Martínez-N Abdusattorov, T Stremavicius-V Pranav, TDV Nguyen -N Yakubboev, A Liang-R Svane, G Sargissian-D Ghosh, LQ Le-J Xiong, B-D Deac -V Karthik, M Bluebaum -I Zemlyanskii, A Donchenko-A Giri, R Praggnanandhaa-R Hovhannisyan, G Meier-D Dubov, V Gujrathi -S Shankland, YK Erdogmus-R Rapport, MVL-V Artemiev, A Grebnev -S Kourkoulos-Arditis, A Esipenko-P Idani, M Pranesh-V Keymer, Y Wei-B Gledura, I Saric-P Maghsoodloo, S Sevian-E Najer, M Adams-L Lodici, L Aronian-S Saleh, R Wojtaszek-V Fedoseev, K Alekseenko-P Leko, S Vokhidov-A Erigaisi.
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