Super Chess Classic Romania 2026
German Vincent Keymer has won Super Chess Classic, the most important chess tournament staged in Romania
Ștefan Baciu, 27.05.2026, 14:49
The most important chess tournament Romania hosted ended with the victory of the great grand master Vincent Keymer of Germany. Super Chess Romania 2026 is a leg of the Grand Chess Tour, which includes tournaments staged this year by Croatia, Poland and United States. This circuit was inspired and supported by the legendary chess player Garry Kasparov, who came to Romania to open the tournament hosted by the museum of Romania’s Central Bank.
It is a world first for a bank to open a chess tournament; we recall that the same place played venue for the Romanian Chess Gala, which marked 100 years since the foundation of the Chess Federation. With 28 thousand registered players chess enjoys high popularity in Romania being the third discipline in terms of players after football and basketball.
Super Chess Classic Romania 2026 brought together 10 top world players such as Javokhir Sindarov of Uzbekistan, who, at the end of this year will be playing Indian Gukesh Dommaraju. Bucharest also had the Dutch Jorden Van Foreest and Aish Giri, the French Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Alireza Firouzja, Wesley So and Fabiano Caruana of the USA and Pragg Rameshbabu of India. Romania’s best chess player, Bogdan Deac benefitted from a wild card.
Bucharest has annually hosted a classic tournament of the Grand Chess Tour since 2021. Three former winners attended this year’s edition, the US challenger Fabiano Caruana, who won the 2023 and 2024 editions, the French Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, winner of the 2022 edition and Indian Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, winner of the 2025 edition.
For Vincent Keymer the aforementioned competition was a first.
Vincent Keymer: “I am happy but of course also tired. There’s been a tough event, but yeah, went well for me. I mean is such a strong field, basically, anyone has a good chance of winning, but that also means that no one has a great chance. So, of course I was hoping too, but you can’t certainly expect to win your first Grand Chess Tour event.”
Vincent Keymer is a 21 year old German chess player and ranks fourth in the world ranking, a position he climbed onto at the beginning of the year. In 2018, when he was only 15 he won a major chess competition Grenke Chess Open, although he was seeded 99th. Last year he became Germany’s champion and this year he emerged as winner of the free-style type outperforming the former world champion Magnus Carlsen and the Russian Ion Nepomniachtchi, a former candidate to the world title.
(bill)
