The 46th Chess Olympiad opens in Samarkand, Uzbekistan on 15 September 2026, and the confirmed team line-ups have just reshaped the favourites list. The United States tops the Open start list without Hikaru Nakamura; defending champion India has pushed world champion Gukesh Dommaraju down to board four; hosts Uzbekistan are third seeds on home soil; and world number one Magnus Carlsen is not in the Norwegian squad at all. A record field of roughly 400 teams from 206 federations makes this the largest Olympiad ever staged, and the first ever held in Central Asia.
FIDE's team registration for the 46th Chess Olympiad has closed and the federations have published their board orders. That is the moment every Olympiad cycle actually begins, because a team's board order — not just its raw strength — decides who plays whom across eleven rounds.
Three headlines came out of it. The United States is the number one seed in the Open section despite leaving out Hikaru Nakamura, its highest-rated player. India, defending champion in both sections, has entered a line-up in strict rating order, which puts reigning world champion Gukesh on board four. And Magnus Carlsen, the world's top-rated player, is again missing from Norway's team, which drops the Norwegians to around 21st seed.
The Open section start list is headed by the United States, with the defending champions immediately behind. These are the FIDE start-list seedings and team averages published with the line-ups:
| Seed | Team | Board 1 | Team average | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | Fabiano Caruana | ~2738 | No Nakamura in the squad |
| 2 | India | Arjun Erigaisi | ~2725 | Double defending champion |
| 3 | Uzbekistan | Javokhir Sindarov | ~2720 | Host nation, 2022 Olympiad gold |
| 4 | China | Wei Yi | ~2700 | Former world champion Ding Liren on board 2 |
| 5 | Germany | Vincent Keymer | ~2680 | Strongest German line-up in years |
| ~21 | Norway | Johan-Sebastian Christiansen | — | No Carlsen, no Tari |
The two favourites in full. Note that both teams have a fifth player who rotates in as the reserve — over eleven rounds in a hot September, the reserve usually plays three or four games.
| Board | United States (seed 1) | Rating | India (seed 2) | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fabiano Caruana | 2792 | Arjun Erigaisi | 2759 |
| 2 | Wesley So | 2765 | Praggnanandhaa R | 2750 |
| 3 | Hans Niemann (Olympiad debut) | 2725 | Nihal Sarin | 2718 |
| 4 | Levon Aronian | 2721 | Gukesh Dommaraju (World Champion) | 2703 |
| 5 (reserve) | Awonder Liang (Olympiad debut) | 2690 | Vidit Gujrathi | 2697 |
Two Olympiad debutants on a top-seeded American team is unusual. Hans Niemann arrives on board three after a season of heavy tournament play, and Awonder Liang, long one of the strongest US juniors, gets his first Olympiad call-up. Levon Aronian, an Olympiad gold medallist with Armenia before switching federations, provides the experience.
Team chess is not individual chess. In an eleven-round Swiss with four boards, matches are decided by which team can convert its lower boards, because the top boards between two strong teams tend to draw each other out. India appears to have taken that arithmetic literally.
By seeding strictly on rating, India puts the reigning world champion opposite the fourth-strongest player of every opponent. Against seeds 20 to 60 — the teams India will meet in the early and middle rounds — that is a rating gap that can regularly exceed 300 points. If Gukesh converts those, India banks board points that the USA has to find somewhere else.
The risk is the mirror image. Board order is fixed for the whole event, so in the decisive last rounds Gukesh cannot be moved up to face Caruana or Sindarov. Whether that is a masterstroke or a missed opportunity is exactly the kind of question that will be argued about for years. If you want the background on how Gukesh got the title in the first place, we covered the qualifying cycle in our report on the 2026 FIDE Candidates and on Sindarov's Candidates victory.
Magnus Carlsen is the highest-rated player in the world and he will not be in Samarkand. Norway's squad is led by Johan-Sebastian Christiansen, with Aryan Tari also unavailable, and the team is seeded outside the top twenty as a result.
This is not new behaviour. Carlsen has been increasingly selective about classical team events, and the Olympiad's eleven classical games in thirteen days is close to the format he has publicly said interests him least. His absence does change the tournament, though: without him there is no clear single favourite on any board one, and the individual gold medal on board one becomes a genuinely open race between Caruana, Sindarov, Arjun Erigaisi and Wei Yi.
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India tops the Women's start list too, and by a clearer margin than in the Open. China arrives significantly weakened, entering without Ju Wenjun, Lei Tingjie and Tan Zhongyi — three of its strongest players — which drops the perennial contender to third seed.
| Seed | Team | Team average | Leading players |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | India | 2476 | Koneru Humpy (2524), Divya Deshmukh (2490), Vaishali Rameshbabu (2489) |
| 2 | Georgia | 2449 | Traditional Olympiad powerhouse |
| 3 | China | 2432 | Without Ju Wenjun, Lei Tingjie and Tan Zhongyi |
| 4 | Kazakhstan | 2421 | Regional rival with a strong junior core |
| 5 | United States | 2413 | Depth rather than a single star |
India's women won gold in Budapest and are the clear favourites to repeat. If you want context on how strong that Indian generation is by historical standards, our ranking of the 10 greatest female chess players of all time puts their ratings next to Judit Polgar, Hou Yifan and Vera Menchik.
The Olympiad format has not changed, but it is worth having the numbers in one place before round one:
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Dates | 15–27 September 2026 (rest day 22 September) |
| Venue | Silk Road International Exhibition Centre, Samarkand, Uzbekistan |
| Sections | Open (all genders) and Women's |
| Entries | ~206 federations, ~400 teams, close to 2,000 players |
| Rounds | 11, Swiss system, four boards per match |
| Scoring | Match points: 2 for a match win, 1 for a draw |
| Time control | 90 min / 40 moves + 30 min, with a 30-second increment from move 1 |
| Trophies | Hamilton-Russell Cup (Open), Vera Menchik Cup (Women's) |
| Chief arbiter | Ivan Syrovy (Slovakia) |
| Governing body | FIDE |
The September 2026 FIDE list, published days before the line-ups, is the rating snapshot the players carry into Samarkand. Praggnanandhaa's win in the 2026 Grand Chess Tour pushed him back into the top ten and past Arjun Erigaisi as India's number one on the live list — even though the Olympiad start list, fixed earlier, still seeds Arjun on board one.
| # | Player | Federation | Rating | In Samarkand? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Magnus Carlsen | Norway | 2823 | No |
| 2 | Hikaru Nakamura | USA | 2792 | No |
| 3 | Fabiano Caruana | USA | 2789 | Yes — board 1 |
| 4 | Javokhir Sindarov | Uzbekistan | 2778 | Yes — board 1 |
| 5 | Wesley So | USA | 2774 | Yes — board 2 |
| 6 | Vincent Keymer | Germany | 2764 | Yes — board 1 |
| 7 | Nodirbek Abdusattorov | Uzbekistan | 2762 | Yes — board 2 |
| 8 | Praggnanandhaa R | India | 2761 | Yes — board 2 |
| 9 | Arjun Erigaisi | India | 2759 | Yes — board 1 |
| 10 | Anish Giri | Netherlands | 2757 | Yes |
Two of the world's top three are staying home; six of the top ten are playing. Wesley So's return to the top five after nearly four years, on the back of a Sinquefield Cup win, is one of the quiet reasons the American team is seeded first. If the rating arithmetic in that table is not obvious to you, our guide to the Elo rating system explains how these numbers move, and we tracked the earlier stage of this same rating race in the May 2026 FIDE rating list report.
On paper the USA is first, but Olympiad gold has gone to the deepest team rather than the highest-rated one in each of the last three editions. India is deeper, has the better reserve situation, and has won this event with a younger version of the same squad. We would make India a narrow favourite in the Open, the USA and Uzbekistan close behind, and India a clear favourite in the Women's. We will update this page once the pairings for round one are published.
How the current world championship cycle was decided.
The earlier snapshot of the same rating race, plus the youngest 2700s ever.
Where today's top ten sit against the whole history of the game.
The endings that decide long Olympiad games, explained with engine-checked diagrams.
An Olympiad without Carlsen and Nakamura still has six of the world's top ten, a reigning world champion playing board four, a host nation with two 2760s, and 206 federations in the same hall. Samarkand starts on 15 September.
While you wait for round one, put the theory to work: start a game in the ChessDada lobby, sharpen up on the daily puzzles, or browse more coverage on the ChessDada Chess Blog.