Know your Candidates: Lei Tingjie and Tan Zhongyi to face off in Women’s Chess Candidates Final

The 2023 FIDE Women’s Candidates Final beginning in Chongqing, China, will decide Ju Wenjun’s opponent in the final.
Chongqing, China’s largest inland city, about 103 times bigger than New York, is hosting one of the biggest chess matches — the 2023 FIDE Women’s Candidates Final.In an all-Chinese affair, the six-game classical chess match will take place between Grandmasters Lei Tingjie and Tan Zhongyi in the city endowed with rich cultural and tourism resources such as mountains, rivers, forests, waterfalls and gorges.At stake is prize money of 60,000 Euros and more importantly, the right to challenge current Women’s World Champion Ju Wenjun for the title in July.
Let’s look at the two players vying for a spot in the title clash.
Tan Zhongyi
She is someone who has ‘been there, done that’. Having won the Women’s World Chess Championship in 2017, Tan is considered the favourite in the contest.
Born in Chongqing in 1991, she started to learn chess from her father even before she turned six. “My father taught me all types of chess games and I fell in love with chess,” she said in an earlier interview.
Her father revealed that she was so obsessed with chess that she would train for 10 hours a day and participate in about 80 matches a year.
Soon she was seen as a child prodigy, winning the World Youth U-10 Girls’ Chess Championship in 2000 and 2001, followed the World Youth U-12 Girls’ Chess Championship in 2002.
A lover of fantasy fiction novels, Tan currently has an Elo rating of 2526 and stands in fifth place in the Chinese rankings and number 12 in the world. The winner of the Women’s World University Chess Championship in 2012 and the 2014 Asian Women’s Blitz Championship, she broke through in 2015, becoming the Chinese Women’s Champion, amongst several other impressive results.
She won the biggest title in women’s chess defeating GM Anna Muzychuk in rapid tiebreaks but lost it in her 2018 match against current women’s world champion GM Ju Wenjun.
Having qualified for the Candidates thanks to her third-place finish in the 2021 Sochi Women’s World Cup, Tan won her place in the final with great results at the 2022 Khiva Pool B Women’s Candidates tournament: defeating Kateryna Lagno and Aleksandra Goryachkina.
Lei Tingjie
Grandmaster Lei Tingjie, rated 2545, overcame the dual threats of sers Mariya and Anna Mazychuk in the quarter-final and semi-final respectively at the 2022 Monaco Pool A Women’s Candidates tournament to make it to the final of the tournament.
Currently ranked fourth and ninth on the Chinese and World rating ls respectively, Lei had qualified for the Candidates in some style, clinching the 2021 FIDE Grand Swiss in Riga with a round to spare.
The 26-year-old has a long l of laurels to her name, having represented China on a myriad of occasions with some stellar performances. She won the 2015 Moscow Open and was a silver medall in the 2016 Women’s World Rapid Championship.
Among some of her biggest achievements is winning the gold medal at the 2016 Asian Nations Cup in Dubai and the 2018 Batumi Olympiad.
She became a Grandmaster in March 2017 and in June that year, Lei won the 6th Chinese Women’s Masters Tournament in Wuxi, ahead of Women’s World Champion Tan.
One may recall that in 2019, Indian Grandmaster Koneru Humpy claimed the World Women’s Rapid Chess Championship after drawing her Armageddon game against Lei in Moscow.