FIDE has scrapped the Candidates rating spot after successive controversies showed that elite players could strategically arrange their tournament schedules to exploit the qualification rules without competing directly against the world's strongest players.
The FIDE Council has approved new qualification paths for the 2028 Candidates Tournaments, both Open and Women's, and the headline change is what's missing. There is no rating qualification place anymore. All eight spots in each Candidates field will now come from actual competitive results: two from the Grand Swiss, two from the World Cup, two from the new Total Chess World Championship Tour, and two from the combined 2026 to 2027 FIDE Circuit standings. FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich framed the change as making qualification "more balanced, transparent, and performance-based."
The blunt version: FIDE has finally accepted that the rating qualification spot could be gamed.
The immediate trigger was Hikaru Nakamura's route to the 2026 Candidates. He was already effectively the highest-rated eligible player, but FIDE's rules also required 40 rated games during the qualification period, and Nakamura hadn't played enough classical chess to hit that number. So he entered a run of low-tier regional events across the US, what he openly called "Mickey Mouse" tournaments, beat considerably weaker opposition, and banked the games he needed. Nothing about it broke a rule. That was rather the point critics made, he was exposing how badly the rule was designed rather than breaking it. FIDE moved mid-cycle to scrap its so-called 400-point rule for players rated above 2650, a change explicitly linked to Nakamura's run by multiple outlets at the time.
It wasn't the first warning sign. In late 2023, Alireza Firouzja played a series of specially arranged matches in France, dubbed "Race to Candidates," against considerably weaker opposition, in what looked like an attempt to boost his rating ahead of the 2024 cycle's own rating-spot cutoff. FIDE publicly raised concerns about the exercise at the time, and in the end chose not to rate those particular games. The controversy still made the same point Nakamura's run would make two years later: a single-player rating race, arranged on your own terms against opponents you'd expect to beat, sits uneasily next to a place in the Candidates.
Nakamura's own comment afterwards was that FIDE should probably scrap the rating spot altogether, since it was too easy to game. FIDE has now done exactly that. From 2028, every route to the Candidates runs through sustained results in FIDE's actual flagship events rather than a rating snapshot that a well-timed run of mismatched games could distort.
Worth noting for the Women's cycle too, the same four-pathway structure applies there, with the Women's Grand Swiss, Women's World Cup, Women's Grand Prix Series, and Women's Circuit each contributing two qualifiers, and no rating spot in that field either.