Andrey Esipenko ready for Candidates 2026 (interview)
At the end of 2025, Andrey Esipenko, a native of the Rostov region, took third place at the Chess World Cup held in Goa, India. Andrey came within one step of the top title. However, even third place allowed him to qualify for the Candidates Tournament, whose winner will face the World Chess Champion.
Now the Rostov grandmaster, together with his team of coaches, is preparing for the most important tournament of his life. Eight of the world’s strongest chess players will take part in the competition. Andrey Esipenko is the only Russian player among the eight. The tournament will be held in Cyprus from March 28 to April 16 and live games from the Candidates 2026 will be daily on Chessdom. According to the regulations, each participant will play against the others twice: once with the black pieces and once with the white pieces. A total of 14 rounds are scheduled. The winner will earn the right to play for the World Championship title against the reigning champion Gukesh.
Round 1 live: Javokhir Sindarov vs Andrey Esipenko
Just a few days before the start of the event, Andrey Esipenko gave an interview to Don Day.
First Steps
Andrey was born into an ordinary family in Novocherkassk. His father had a small business, and his mother works in the banking sector. From an early age, the boy had many hobbies—he played football, practiced acrobatics, hockey, and table tennis. Everything changed when he was taught to play chess.
The Road to the Top
The future grandmaster’s journey into professional chess began at the age of seven. His father noticed his talent and found him a coach—Alexey Kornyukov, the only FIDE International Master in the city. Twice a week, the boy traveled to a chess school in Rostov.
A turning point for the young player came in 2012. At that time, 10-year-old Andrey came under the wing of grandmaster Dmitry Kryakvin. Thanks to his guidance, Esipenko took a prize place at the Russian Championship and earned the opportunity to compete in the European Youth Championship, which he won brilliantly. This victory secured him an invitation to the World Championship.
Esipenko says for Don Day, “We traveled to the World Championship in Slovenia at our own expense,” Andrey recalls. “It wasn’t easy to raise the money. Sponsors helped a little. I went to the global tournament already as the strongest player in Europe and was confident in myself. But that was when I first felt the bitterness of defeat. I didn’t even make it into the top three—I lost to a Vietnamese player. There were many tears. My father was even more upset than I was.”
Global Recognition
Esipenko first made a major name for himself at the 2017 World Rapid Chess Championship, sensationally defeating former World Rapid Champion Sergey Karjakin. In 2018, at the age of 16, Andrey was awarded the title of International Grandmaster. In 2019, the Don-region chess player qualified for the World Cup for the first time, where he defeated former FIDE World Champion Ruslan Ponomariov in the first round, but lost to Peter Svidler in the second.
He gained worldwide fame in 2021, when at the prestigious Wijk aan Zee tournament he defeated the reigning World Champion Magnus Carlsen in a single game.
“At first, I didn’t understand what was happening,” Andrey recalls. “I thought it was a dream. In my childhood, Magnus was my idol. I followed his games and admired him. I could never have imagined that one day my chess career would reach such a level.”
Fight for the Crown
Esipenko considers his main career achievement to be his prize-winning finish at the World Cup in November 2025, which earned him the right to compete in the Candidates Tournament for the world chess crown. However, according to the player himself, the trip to Goa, India, turned out to be far from easy for him.
“In India, besides strong opponents and psychologically difficult games, we had problems with food. The dishes were very spicy, and sometimes it was simply impossible to eat them. My second, David Paravyan, and I went to restaurants a couple of times, but the local cuisine clearly didn’t suit us. The only thing that tasted good was bananas—that’s what we lived on.” Esipenko continues, “There was a tense moment in the game with Idani Pouya in the Round of 1/32 from which it seemed impossible to escape. I was looking at the position, while David had already gone back to our room to pack our things to go home. But that time luck smiled on me, and I stayed in the tournament.”
But the hardest moment came in the semifinals. Esipenko blundered a rook and lost to Wei Yi. Andrey was closer to victory than ever before, but the outcome was decided by a gross mistake, he failed to move his rook out of the knight’s attack while defending against a less significant threat. Esipenko shares, “After that painful defeat, I spent the first few hours lying in my room, staring at the ceiling in a kind of daze. But then I recovered, and David and I went to watch a football match. It’s hard to say what lesson I learned from that loss. Probably, not to overestimate your position in the game. The main thing is not to dwell on a bad mood, another tough game still lay ahead.”
Read: Andrey Esipenko qualifies for Candidates 2026
The team of Andrey Esipenko for Candidates Chess 2026
Andrey Esipenko will be accompanied in Cyprus by his mother, father, younger brother Artem, his second, his wife (Esipenko got married to Sofia Vetokhina, sister of the Russian Grandmaster Savva Vetokhin in 2025), and the president of the Rostov Region Chess Federation, Arutyun Surmalyan.