Frans Peeters – https://www.flickr.com/images/suspeeters/53461827304/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=162201678
The Match
The 2025 FIDE Girls’s World Chess Championship will happen from April 1 to 23 between Shanghai and Chongqing, China. The present Girls’s World Chess Champion, GM Ju Wenjun, will face off in opposition to the challenger, GM Tan Zhongyi, in 12 video games of classical chess.
Every spherical will likely be streamed by Lichess on YouTube and Twitch with our hosts WIM Jesse February, the two-time and reigning African Girls’s Chess Champion, and GM Toms Kantāns, the 2023 Latvian Chess Champion – extra particulars will likely be coming quickly.
Participant Profile
Ju Wenjun is the reigning champion since Could 2018, topped by defeating the present challenger, Tan Zhongyi, and efficiently defending her title in November 2018, 2020 and 2023.
Aside from successful the Girls’s World Chess Champion title, she has a number of successes on the nationwide, continental and world chess scene on each particular person and workforce stage. A few of her different noteworthy achievements embody:
- Chinese language Girls’s Chess Champion (2010, 2014)
- Girls’s World Speedy Chess Champion (2017, 2018)
- World Blitz Chess Champion (2024)
- forty second Chess Olympiad gold medalist
- Girls’s World Staff Chess Championship gold medalist (2009, 2011)
Path to Girls’s World Chess Championship 2025
Ju certified for the Could 2018 Girls’s World Chess Championship match because the winner of the FIDE Girls’s Grand Prix 2015–16, difficult and subsequently defeating Tan Zhongyi 5.5-4.5. She went on to win the November 2018 Girls’s World Chess Championship in a 64 gamers knockout format, and defended her title in 2020 in opposition to Aleksandra Goryachkina (6-6, 2.5-1.5 tiebreaks) and once more in 2023 in opposition to Lei Tingjie (6.5-5.5).
Notable Video games
Ju is a positional participant who is aware of when it is the fitting time to strike, with distinctive qualities in advanced endgames. Let’s check out three outstanding video games from her excellent profession.
On the eighth Asian Chess Championships in 2009, 18-year-old Ju sacrificed a bishop to defeat WGM Jilin Zhang with a devastating kingside assault:
https://lichess.org/KqF4v3PK/black#0
Within the second sport, Ju sacrificed an alternate for positional compensation to win in opposition to three-time Girls’s World Champion GM Hou Yifan within the Gibraltar Masters 2017:
https://lichess.org/TcKW9j7f/black#0
The third sport is Ju’s highest rated win up to now – she beat GM Alireza Firouzja, the previous world quantity two, within the Tata Metal Masters 2024:
https://lichess.org/examine/cmDGoJr1/BEE2iSzB#0
Preview
Keep tuned for the following and last preview publish, which is able to look nearer on the 2025 Girls’s World Championship match, and browse our earlier publish on the challenger GM Tan Zhongyi.
