Esports World Cup Chess 2025: Team Liquid, Falcons, NaVi and other clubs signed grandmasters

Leading esports organizations quickly reacted to the inclusion of chess in the Esports World Cup 2025 competitive program by signing contracts with grandmasters. Notably, Magnus Carlsen, who became the ambassador of EWC Chess, will represent Team Liquid alongside Fabiano Caruana, while Hikaru Nakamura has joined Team Falcons.

Other clubs also announced the signing of chess players. Natus Vincere signed three grandmasters at once - Nodirbek Abdusattarov, Wesley So and Alexander Bortnik. Aurora Gaming signed a contract with Ian Nepomnyashchy, and LGD Gaming and Team Vitality - with Ding Lizhen and Maxim Vachier-Lagrave respectively.

The chess tournament, as part of Esports World Cup 2025, will be held in Saudi Arabia from July 31 to August 3. The 16 participants will raffle off a prize pool of $1,500,000.

This discipline is the 15th at EWC 2025, before the organizers announced competitions in Dota 2, CS2, EA SPORTS FC, Rocket League and other games on PC, consoles and mobile devices.

Esports World Cup 2025 will take place in July and August 2025. As in 2024, in addition to individual disciplines, clubs will compete in an overall competition. At EWC 2024, $20 million was divided between the organizations, $7 million of which was earned by Team Falcons.

As CyberScore reported earlier, the first Olympic esports games will take place in 2027 in Riyadh.