World Chess Championship 2021
The World Chess Championship 2021 will be a chess match between the reigning World Chess Champion, Magnus Carlsen, and a challenger to determine the World Chess Champion. It will be held under the auspices of FIDE, the world chess federation. The match was originally scheduled for the latter half of 2020, but has been postponed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Candidates Tournament
The challenger will be the winner of a Candidates Tournament, which is an eight-player double-round robin tournament played in Yekaterinburg, Russia. Originally scheduled for 15 March to 5 April 2020, the second half of the tournament was postponed by FIDE on 26 March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is expected that the Candidates Tournament will be concluded in late 2020.The qualifiers for the Candidates Tournament were:
| Qualification method | Player |
| 2018 World Championship runner-up | Fabiano Caruana |
| The top two finishers at the Chess World Cup 2019 | |
| The top two finishers at the Chess World Cup 2019 | Ding Liren |
| The top finisher in the FIDE Grand Swiss Tournament 2019. | Wang Hao |
| The top two finishers in the FIDE Grand Prix 2019. | Alexander Grischuk |
| The top two finishers in the FIDE Grand Prix 2019. |  Ian Nepomniachtchi |
| Highest average rating. | Anish Giri |
| Highest average rating. | Maxime Vachier-Lagrave |
| Wild card chosen by organizer, subject to eligibility criteria | Kirill Alekseenko |
If one or more players declined the invitation to play in the Candidates Tournament, the players with the next highest average ratings would qualify. On March 6, Teimour Radjabov withdrew due to concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic, and this rule was used to select Maxime Vachier-Lagrave as his replacement.
Results
Championship match
Organization
The organisation rights belonging to World Chess, the commercial partner of FIDE.The match will be a best-of-14 match, with tie breaks. This was increased from best-of-12, after all 12 regular games were drawn in the previous match in 2018.
On 29 June 2020 the match was officially postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Candidates Tournament scheduled to finish in the latter half of 2020.
Location
Bids were to be presented no later than on 1 March 2019 to World Chess, with an inspection at the proposed venues to be made between 1 July and 15 August 2019.In 2018, Monaco and Vienna expressed intention to bid for the event, as has Saint Petersburg.
Stavanger, Norway announced a bid in March 2019, but withdrew its bid in June 2019, after Carlsen expressed reluctance to play the match in Norway.
In November 2019, at the Hamburg Grand Prix Opening Ceremony, FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich announced that FIDE had received bids from UAE and Argentina to host the match.