A Visual Recap of the Sinquefiled Cup 2026

The Sinquefield Cup was again filled with many top players and it also served as the last leg of this year’s Grand Chess Tour before the finals, which start on the 22nd of August.

I want to take a look at the tournament and try to give a visual overview of what happened, as I’ve done for other tournaments in the past.

Alongside the Sinquefield Cup, there was also the Cairns Cup, an elite women’s tournament, which also attracted many of the best players in the world. I've also covered it in my Substack post but couldn't include all the images in this post on Lichess, so I'm only looking at the Sinquefield Cup here.

Score

Let’s start by looking at how many points the players scored with each colour.

Wesley So and Praggnanandhaa finished the classical tournament tied, so they played a rapid playoff, which resulted in 2 uneventful draws, before So managed to hold the armageddon game as black, which meant that he won the tournament in the end.

Jorden van Foreest probably sticks out most from this graph, he had a difficult tournament and lost all his games with the black pieces. But he was fighting until the final round, where he played a King’s Gambit (!) in his game against Keymer.

We can also look at the number of decisive games from each player.

Van Foreest and Keymer had the most decisive games in the tournament, but Keymer had a more even performance with 3 wins and 2 losses.

From this graph it’s also clear that So stuck to his usual tactics of playing solidly and using the chances that were presented to him, which resulted in 2 wins and no losses.

Better and worse games

The game results alone don’t tell the whole story of the games, so I also want to look at the number of times the players stood better or worse.

This first graph shows the relative number of moves where the players stood much better, slightly better, equal, slightly worse, or much worse. Positions are counted as much better when the engine evaluation is greater than +1, slightly better positions have an evaluation between +0.5 and +1, and equal positions have an evaluation between -0.5 and +0.5.

This shows once again that Wesley So had a very solid tournament, where he never stood much worse in his classical games, while it highlights van Foreest’s rough tournament.

Keymer and Praggnanandhaa both had many very good positions, which is also reflected in the fact that they are the only players who have one 3 games in the tournament.

We can also look at how well they players converted their chances by comparing the number of games where they got a better position (with an evaluation of greater than +1) and the number of their wins.

Overall, there weren’t too many missed chances, with Vachier-Lagrave being the only player who failed to convert 2 better games. Both players that tied for first converted all their chances into full points, so they didn’t have any trouble with their efficiency.

Similarly, we can also look at the number of games where the players got into worse positions and compare this to the number of losses.

Since there weren’t too many missed chances, there are only a few bad games that players managed to save.

As we’ve seen before, So didn’t get into any worse positions, and Pragg was only worse in his single loss. Aronian managed to save 3 bad positions, while van Foreest managed to hold 2 worse positions.

Engine evaluation

Now we can also take a more direct look at what the engine has to say about the play in this tournament.

Firstly, let’s look at the number of inaccuracies, mistakes and blunders from each player.

Amazingly, Wesley So didn’t have any inaccuracies during the whole tournament. His high accuracy is partly due to having 2 games which probably were completely part of his preparation, as he finished them with more time on the clock then he started the games with.

Finally, we can also look at the accuracy of the players. Since accuracy alone can be misleading since it depends on how easy the positions are to play, I like to compare the accuracy of a player to the accuracy of his opponents.

As one would expect from everything we’ve seen so far, Wesley So had the highest accuracy, but more importantly, he also played much more accurately than his opponents in his games.

The importance of the opponent’s accuracy can be seen when comparing van Foreest and Keymer. Both players played with roughly the same accuracy, but Keymer was more accurate than his opponents, which allowed him to score more points than a more accurate player like Aronian, while van Foreest’s opponents handled the positions better than he did, which lead to his poor result.

Let me know what you thought about the tournaments and if there are any stats you’d like to see in future posts.

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