Every two years, chess stops being an individual game for a little while. Flags come out, captains make lineup decisions under real pressure, and players who spend most of their careers fighting only for themselves suddenly have an entire nation's result resting on their shoulders. That event is the Chess Olympiad, and this year it's bigger than it has ever been.
The 46th Chess Olympiad begins on September 15 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, with the opening ceremony, and the actual games start the following day. It runs through September 27 at the Silk Road International Exhibition Centre, with eleven rounds of classical chess played over twelve days and a single rest day built into the middle of the schedule. It's the first time the Olympiad has ever been held in Central Asia, and by the numbers alone, it's already the largest edition in the tournament's history.
A record-breaking field
Roughly 400 teams have registered across the two sections, 208 in the Open event and around 190 in the Women's event, breaking the previous record of 380 teams set at the last Olympiad in Budapest. Close to 2,000 players will compete in Samarkand, representing nearly every chess-playing nation on earth. Among them are 233 grandmasters and 214 international masters, which gives some sense of just how deep the talent pool runs, well past the handful of names that usually make headlines.
Every team fields five players, four of whom play in any given round while the fifth sits in reserve, and the format uses the Swiss system, meaning teams are paired against opponents of similar strength as the rounds progress rather than following a fixed bracket. It's a format built to reward consistency over eleven rounds, not just one or two big results.
How the scoring actually works
One detail that surprises newer chess fans is how team results are counted. It isn't about who scores the most individual points across the board. Match points decide everything: a team gets two match points for winning a round and one for drawing it, regardless of whether that win was a narrow 2.5 to 1.5 or a complete 4-0 sweep.
That single rule shapes the entire tournament's strategy. It means depth matters just as much as star power. A team with four solid, reliable players from top to bottom can out-perform a team that's brilliant on board one but shaky further down the lineup, because every board counts equally toward the two points that actually decide the round.
The teams to watch
India arrives in Samarkand defending an extraordinary double. At the last Olympiad in Budapest, India's Open team went through the entire event losing just one match point out of a possible twenty-two, and the Women's team won gold as well, making India the first country to sweep both golds in the same Olympiad since China managed it back in 2018. Defending that double is one of the biggest storylines of the event, and India returns with serious firepower, including reigning World Champion Gukesh, who lines up on board four behind Arjun Erigaisi, R Praggnanandhaa and Nihal Sarin, with Vidit Gujrathi rounding out the squad.
The United States enters as the top seed in the Open section by average rating, led by world number three Fabiano Caruana alongside Wesley So, Levon Aronian, and a notable new face in Hans Niemann, playing his first Olympiad for the country after years of being one of chess's most talked-about outsiders.
Then there's the host nation. Uzbekistan arrives with home advantage and arguably the most exciting young team in the sport right now, built around Javokhir Sindarov, who enters Samarkand fresh off winning the 2026 Candidates Tournament and is set to challenge for the World Championship later this year. Alongside him sits Nodirbek Abdusattorov, another player firmly established among the world's elite. Uzbekistan already has Olympiad gold from 2022 and bronze from 2024, and this generation has only gotten stronger since.
China rounds out the top seeds, headed by Wei Yi and featuring the return of former World Champion Ding Liren to Olympiad duty, while Germany brings a squad where every single player is rated above 2600, giving them one of the deepest lineups in the entire field even without a household name at the very top.
In the Women's section, India again leads the seedings, with Koneru Humpy back on board one alongside Divya Deshmukh, R Vaishali, Vantika Agrawal and Savitha Shri B. Georgia, Kazakhstan, China and the United States round out the strongest contenders chasing India's title.
The names who won't be there
Almost as notable as who's playing is who isn't. Magnus Carlsen, the world's highest-rated player and the sport's most recognizable face, will not represent Norway this year, a decision that's become one of the biggest storylines heading into the event given how often he's anchored Norway's team in past Olympiads. Hikaru Nakamura is also absent from the American lineup. And Russia, historically one of the most dominant nations in Olympiad history, will not be competing at all.
Their absence has shifted the conversation heading into Samarkand. With the sport's biggest individual star sitting this one out, the tournament feels more genuinely open than usual, less about any single dominant favorite and more about which nation's full squad holds up best across eleven grinding rounds.
A preview of a bigger rivalry
One matchup fans are already circling on the calendar is a possible meeting between India and Uzbekistan. Gukesh and Sindarov are set to face off for the World Championship later this year, and if their teams cross paths in Samarkand, it would offer an early, unofficial preview of that rivalry, months before the real title match begins. Whether the two of them actually end up on the same board depends on lineup decisions from both captains, but the possibility alone has added an extra layer of intrigue to the draw.
More than just the games
The Olympiad is never only about the chess. This edition also hosts the 3rd FIDE Chess Olympiad for People with Disabilities, running alongside the main event, along with the FIDE Congress and the federation's presidential election, both taking place in Samarkand during the same fortnight. For those twelve days, the city isn't just hosting a tournament. It's functioning as the administrative and political center of world chess as well, with decisions made there shaping the direction of the sport for years afterward.
Why the Olympiad matters more than any single tournament
Individual tournaments come and go throughout the chess calendar, but the Olympiad occupies a different place in the sport entirely. It's the one event where a player from a country with almost no chess infrastructure can sit across the board from a reigning World Champion, where a nation's entire chess program gets judged publicly over the course of two weeks, and where the result belongs to a team and a flag rather than to any one individual's rating. That's part of why the format rewards depth over star power, and why the absence of any single player, even someone as dominant as Carlsen, doesn't diminish the event the way it might diminish an individual tournament. The Olympiad has always been bigger than any one name on the crosstable, and this year, with a record field and several of the sport's biggest storylines converging in one city, that feels more true than ever.
