Fabiano Caruana
- December 5, 2025
Defeated in the 2018 World Championship Match
Highest FIDE Elo rating: 2844 (third highest in history)
Ranking: World number two for a total of 70 months (almost six years) between 2014 – 2025, including over three years continuously between 2018 – 2021.
Tournament Career: Winner of 24 super-tournaments:
2018 Candidates Tournament
5-time winner of the U.S. Championship
3-time winner of the Sinquefield Cup + one loss in a tie-break
3-time winner of the Dortmund International Chess Meeting
2-time winner of the Superbet Chess Classic
winner of the London Chess Classic 2017, Norway Chess 2018, Grenke Chess Classic 2018, Tata Steel Masters 2020
and several others…
Chess Olympiads: gold team and bronze individual medals
Why he deserves it:
Fabiano Caruana will participate in his sixth consecutive Candidates Tournament in a few months, which demonstrates both his consistency and the fact that he remains a star of the present and is not yet obsolete. Considering how his generation peers (Carlsen, Nakamura, Ding) are gradually leaving classical chess, it is Caruana who somewhat upholds the honor of this generation today.
The answer to why Fabiano is so good is simple. In the era of one of the greatest players in history, Magnus Carlsen, Caruana has achieved such success in classical chess that he has undoubtedly earned the position of the second-best player of Magnus’s era. Allow me to prove this with a few simple numbers.
Caruana’s highest rating is the third highest in history after Carlsen and Kasparov. Since Carlsen became the number one on the ranking, Caruana has spent by far the most time as the number two behind him. And it’s not even close. The current world number two, Nakamura, would have to spend several more years in second place to catch up with Fabi in this regard. Caruana was number two for three years in a row, which is very impressive in today’s competitive era.
Caruana has won 24 super-tournaments, which is comfortably the second-highest number in the Magnus Carlsen era. He has won all the major tournaments of today – Sinquefield Cup, Norway Chess, Tata Steel Masters, London Chess Classic, and others like the Dortmund tournament, adding to that five victories in the strongest national championship in the world – the U.S. Championship. Particularly memorable is his victory at the Sinquefield Cup 2014, which was promoted as the strongest tournament in history before it began. Caruana started the tournament with seven consecutive wins, literally wiping out the world’s best players, and his performance rating of 3098 remains the best tournament performance ever achieved.
His most important triumph is, of course, the 2018 Candidates Tournament, which allowed him to challenge Carlsen. It is considered by many to be the highest-quality title match ever, with both protagonists being clearly the best players in the world and separated by just three Elo points. For the first and so far only time, all games ended in a draw, and Carlsen confirmed his role as the favorite in the tie-break.
Best Game:
Magnus Carlsen vs Fabiano Caruana
Sinquefield Cup 2014
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Miroslav Janeček graduated in English Philology at Palacký University Olomouc. Currently he works in Prague as a content editor for a large marketing company. His roots are in Opava - the historic and cultural centre of the Czech part of Silesia. That city is also the home of Slezan Opava, the chess club where Miroslav started to play chess, later went on to work as a youth coach and which he to this day proudly represents. As an aspiring chess publicist, he is the main author of articles on ChessDB.cz. In his free time, in addition to chess and writing, he also devotes himself to racket sports, history, and literature.