3 min readMumbaiUpdated: Apr 16, 2026 11:44 PM IST
After a phase of two years, where almost nothing went right for her, Vaishali Rameshbabu delivered the biggest hit of her career by winning the cut-throat Women’s Candidates tournament. Plenty has been said about how Vaishali was the lowest-rated player in the eight-woman field. But a true measure of just how much of a Cinderella tale her victory at Cyprus was can be drawn by the fact that she will still leave the Mediterranean island as the lowest-rated player among the eight, despite gaining 26 ELO points over the course of two weeks while most of the others lost rating.
The win means Vaishali is only the second Indian woman in history who will compete at the Women’s World Championship after Koneru Humpy in Tirana in 2011.
One of the early believers in the 24-year-old Vaishali’s talent was five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand, who named her in the first cohort of his chess school (Westbridge Anand Chess Academy). In fact, Vaishali was the only female prodigy handpicked to be part of a group of prodigies that had Gukesh, Pragg and Nihal Sarin.
“I knew that Vaishali was a strong player, certainly one of the best female hopes, when we selected her for WACA. At that stage, she’d already accomplished a lot. But there was stuff that I discovered about her over the next few years, especially her tactical abilities and the ability to calculate, which you will often see rescue her in difficult positions, and the general calm she exudes even in difficult tournaments. Even if she’s suffering inside, she’s able to keep a certain composure at the board,” Anand told The Indian Express from Cyprus on Thursday.
“I’m so proud of her. So proud that I have had the chance to support here through WACA for the last five years,” Anand added. “This is a very happy occasion for Indian women’s chess.”
Praising Vaishali, Anand said that she had shown determination, hard work and resilience.
“And mostly, she showed self-belief! She had a slow start and a very difficult loss to Zhu Jiner (in round 5), who would later go on to beat her again in the tournament as well. She had multiple games which went in unpredictable directions. But she kept calm, and was always in better control of her nerves than the rest of the field. She just hung in there in what was a very, very combative tournament,” Anand said.
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