3 min readApr 10, 2026 06:41 PM IST
After 10 rounds of the Candidates tournament in Cyprus, Uzbek phenom Javokhir Sindarov holds a significant edge heading into the last four rounds. A cushion of a two-point lead over the rest of the field means that at the end of the year, we may very well have a World Championship battle between two of the youngest contenders at the World Championship in history with the 20-year-old Sindarov taking on a 19-year-old Gukesh. One of the men impressed by Sindarov’s rampaging run at the Candidates is chess legend Levon Aronian.
“I feel like somehow everybody’s kind of collapsing and just letting Sindarov do anything he wants with them,” Aronian told the St Louis Chess Club’s YouTube channel in an interview while Sindarov was playing against Praggnanandhaa in the 10th round on Thursday. “I think this Candidates tournament is not as exciting as we all were hoping for. Especially for our boys (US stars Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura).”
Talking about what makes Sindarov a lethal player, Aronian said: “Sindarov is a very tactical player. He’s very resourceful. He is not affected psychologically, if you allow him to get in his type of positions, then you know, he doesn’t look back. And it’s a big advantage when you have no doubts about (what to play), you don’t need to calculate things three times. You’re very confident and of course that’s what strikes me about him. He’s a very open guy, I mean a very friendly, very nice person, very kind of out there. You can clearly see his talent so if I wasn’t rooting for our American boys (Caruana and Nakamura) I would definitely be rooting for him.”
Aronian was also asked if he expected Sindarov to be dominating the Candidates this comprehensively before the tournament began and whether Aronian thought of the young Uzbek as even a third or fourth favorite.
“I did rate his chances quite high. I mean, said that he’s one of the shadow favorites. I was thinking that
Fabi is a huge favorite, and I still think if this tournament was played once again, Fabiano would still be a clear favorite. But, you know, there are certain things like one game you lose and it seems like not a big deal, but it just completely puts you in this kind of a frenzy mode. This happened to me as well many times in the Candidates. It’s just one game, right? it’s just a point, but then you just collapse because your whole balance and everything that you’ve been working for kind of feels wrong,” Aronian reasoned.
