Women's World Chess Championship 2025 Preview: Ju Wenjun Profile

The Match

The 2025 FIDE Women’s World Chess Championship will take place from April 1 to 23 between Shanghai and Chongqing, China. The current Women's World Chess Champion, GM Ju Wenjun, will face off against the challenger, GM Tan Zhongyi, in 12 games of classical chess.

Each round will be streamed by Lichess on YouTube and Twitch with our hosts WIM Jesse February, the two-time and reigning African Women's Chess Champion, and GM Toms Kantāns, the 2023 Latvian Chess Champion - more details will be coming soon.

Player Profile

Ju Wenjun is the reigning champion since May 2018, crowned by defeating the current challenger, Tan Zhongyi, and successfully defending her title in November 2018, 2020 and 2023.

Apart from winning the Women’s World Chess Champion title, she has multiple successes on the national, continental and world chess scene on both individual and team level. Some of her other noteworthy achievements include:

1. Chinese Women’s Chess Champion (2010, 2014)
2. Women’s World Rapid Chess Champion (2017, 2018)
3. World Blitz Chess Champion (2024)
4. 42nd Chess Olympiad gold medalist
5. Women’s World Team Chess Championship gold medalist (2009, 2011)

Path to Women's World Chess Championship 2025

Ju qualified for the May 2018 Women’s World Chess Championship match as the winner of the FIDE Women's Grand Prix 2015–16, challenging and subsequently defeating Tan Zhongyi 5.5-4.5. She went on to win the November 2018 Women’s World Chess Championship in a 64 players knockout format, and defended her title in 2020 against Aleksandra Goryachkina (6-6, 2.5-1.5 tiebreaks) and again in 2023 against Lei Tingjie (6.5-5.5).

Notable Games

Ju is a positional player who knows when it's the right time to strike, with exceptional qualities in complex endgames. Let's take a look at three remarkable games from her outstanding career.

At the 8th Asian Chess Championships in 2009, 18-year-old Ju sacrificed a bishop to defeat WGM Jilin Zhang with a devastating kingside attack:

In the second game, Ju sacrificed an exchange for positional compensation to win against three-time Women's World Champion GM Hou Yifan in the Gibraltar Masters 2017:

The third game is Ju's highest rated win to date – she beat GM Alireza Firouzja, the former world number two, in the Tata Steel Masters 2024:

Preview

Stay tuned for the next and final preview post, which will look closer at the 2025 Women's World Championship match, and read our previous post on the challenger GM Tan Zhongyi.