Chess Olympiad 46 in Samarkand: India Defends a Double Crown

In September 2026, in Budapest, when the final game of the 45th Chess Olympiad ended, I sat alone in my small apartment in Saint Petersburg, staring at the screen, and for nearly half an hour I could not write a single line. India had taken gold in both the Open and the Women's sections. One country, one Olympiad, two crowns. In almost fifty years of sitting in tournament halls and following chess from grandstands and midnight wire reports, I had seen something similar only once, and that was in an era when people still refused to call chess a sport.

Two years later, the Indians are back at the board, and this time the city is called Samarkand.

The 46th Chess Olympiad runs from 16 September 2026 to 27 September 2026 at the Silk Road International Exhibition Centre in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. India arrives as defending champion in both sections, carrying a squad strong enough to make the whole chess world ask whether history will repeat itself.

The Open section has 208 teams. The Women's section has 191. Never before has a Chess Olympiad gathered so many teams. Alongside the twin Olympiads, the 3rd FIDE Chess Olympiad for People with Disabilities is also under way in Samarkand.

Samarkand is a city of caravans. People passed through to trade silk for horses, silver for spices, and then moved on. The Chess Olympiad is a caravan of the same kind: every two years it pitches camp in a new city, and each time it carries a different generation of players. When the stadium empties of the ball, memory begins to score. In chess, memory does not live in goals; it lives in games people still retell thirty years later.

The format is an 11-round Swiss system. Teams on similar scores are paired each round; no team is eliminated, and every squad plays all 11 rounds. A match win earns two match points, a draw one, a loss none. The time control is 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, then 30 minutes for the rest of the game, with a 30-second increment per move starting from move one. Players may offer a draw at any time.

These read like technical details, but they decide who wins the gold, far more than the form of any individual.

India's Open team features R Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi and world champion D Gukesh. Those three names take chess back to Budapest, where they beat opponents far more experienced than themselves. Gukesh was eighteen that year; Praggnanandhaa and Erigaisi had not yet turned twenty-five. The women's team is led by Koneru Humpy, and her return is one of the most closely watched stories in Samarkand.

Humpy was absent in Budapest. Now, at thirty-eight, her comeback invites a question: can a former world number two still carry an eleven-round Swiss that stretches across twelve days? At Luzhniki, the old bird learned that landing is also a way of flying. On a chess board the old bird no longer flies on reflex; it flies by knowing exactly where to spend its strength.

Here is what short bulletins usually skip: at the Olympiad, the strongest team does not win on board one.

An Olympiad match is played over four boards, plus a reserve. To win a match a team needs 2.5 points from four games; at 2-2 each side takes one match point. The title, therefore, is the sum of four small boards, not the glory of one individual. When Gukesh sits on board one, he faces the opponent's strongest board one, and his rating edge over that opponent is usually far smaller than the edge his teammates enjoy on boards three and four.

In other words, the Olympiad title is decided on the boards television covers least.

There is one more detail, small but decisive, and I believe it will be the quiet key to the whole tournament: the 30-second increment from move one turns the Olympiad into a test of endgame technique rather than a race of calculation speed. Previously, without an early increment, a player could plunge into complications hoping the opponent would run out of time. Now everyone has at least 30 seconds per move, and death by clock in the final moves has almost vanished. The result is longer games, endgames steered to theoretical positions, and a winner who is the better technician rather than the faster hand.

For a thirty-eight-year-old like Humpy, that is good news. For a young team like India, it is an examination they have never had to take.

And here I want to argue against the majority.

People look at India's line-up and see a golden generation at its peak. But defending a double crown is a completely different task from winning one for the first time. In 2026 the Indians came to Budapest as a team rated below its true strength; they played with the recklessness of people who had nothing to lose. In 2026 they arrive as everyone's target. Every round, opponents prepare harder, play more solidly, and most importantly — India can no longer use surprise as a tactical weapon.

In an 11-round Swiss, that means India must win the way every champion has had to learn: by winning the matches in which they do not play well.

A record-sized Olympiad also does not mean what people assume. Most of the 208 Open teams come to learn, to collect rating points, to chase grandmaster norms for young players, or simply to put their country on the chess map. Only around fifteen to twenty teams can realistically fight for gold. The first three rounds are therefore ceremony. The real tournament begins in round seven, when the Swiss system pushes the strongest teams together, and every move costs more.

Based on my own experience following these matches, I have seen many teams lead after six rounds and then fade, because they did not have four boards capable of suffering. The Olympiad does not award gold to the team with the brightest star. It awards gold to the team that, in rounds nine and ten, still has someone willing to sit still in a tedious endgame and wait for the opponent to lose himself.

I was a chess player and a tournament organiser before I moved into media. Organising taught me that a tournament is not measured by the number of registered players, but by the number of games played to the last move. In Samarkand, with 208 and 191 teams, the organisers are handling a logistics load no Olympiad has ever carried. That is a technical achievement. But do not confuse scale with depth.

Looking at the Chess Olympiad for People with Disabilities running alongside in Samarkand, I think differently. There are no sponsorship contracts there, no rating list worth negotiating a bonus over. There are only people sitting across from each other, playing to the last move. The day the heart stops, I learned to beat slower but deeper. Chess, in its most primal form, beats at that same rhythm.

So when the 46th Olympiad closes on 27 September 2026, what will remain?

Perhaps a third consecutive gold for India, and the story of a young generation that has grown up. Perhaps an Olympiad in which people discover that four boards, not one star, are the true unit of this sport. But what I want to keep after twelve days in Samarkand is not the medal table. I want to keep the image of a young player at the board at eleven at night, hands no longer shaking, understanding that from here on, someone at home is waiting for every move he makes.

The chess board is the only place where a sixty-five-year-old and an eighteen-year-old meet under exactly the same rules.