Ju Wenjun has once again proven herself the undisputed queen of the chessboard.
On Wednesday in Chongqing, the 34-year-old Chinese grandmaster clinched the 2025 Fide Women’s World Championship, defeating compatriot and longtime rival Tan Zhongyi by a commanding score of 6½–2½. With the victory, Ju becomes only the fourth woman in history to win the title five times, joining a storied class that includes Vera Menchik, Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze.
The best-of-12-games match ended with three contests to spare after Ju secured a calm, risk-free draw in game nine to punctuate a stretch of four straight wins that all but sealed the result. She takes home the winner’s purse of €300,000 ($340,580) while Tan earns €200,000.
Ju, who has held the world title since 2018, now extends her reign into an eighth year. This was her most decisive triumph to date. In previous matches, she’d always needed the final game to prevail. Not this time. Even after falling behind early with a loss in the second game, she stormed back, breaking the match wide open with four consecutive wins from the fifth through eighth games – something no player had done in a women’s world championship since the 1950s.
Her victory is also the latest chapter in a personal rivalry nearly a decade in the making. In 2017, Tan eliminated Ju en route to becoming world champion. The following year, Ju won the rematch, narrowly edging Tan to claim her first world title. Since then, she’s successfully defended the crown in every format: through a 64-player knockout later in 2018, a dramatic match against Aleksandra Goryachkina in 2020 and a tense face-off with Lei Tingjie in 2023.
This 2025 edition brought the rivalry full circle. The match was staged across both players’ hometowns – starting in Ju’s Shanghai and moving midway to Tan’s Chongqing – a symbolic nod to the shared history and national dominance of Chinese women’s chess.
For a while, it looked as though the fight would be close. Tan drew first blood with a shock win in game two, taking advantage of a rare Ju error in the endgame. But Ju struck back immediately, and the turning point came just after the halfway mark. In game five, she dismantled Tan’s Sicilian setup with positional pressure. Then she built momentum – tactically sharp in game six, surgically precise in games seven and eight.
Each of those victories told a story. In the seventh game, Tan created real chances but overplayed her hand, pushing for a win she desperately needed and slipping into time trouble. In the eighth, Ju passed up a chance to force a draw, choosing instead to grind out a difficult endgame – and doing so flawlessly. That marked the first time a player had won at least four straight games in a women’s world title match since Elisaveta Bykova won six on the trot against Olga Rubtsova in 1958.
By the time they returned to the board for Wednesday’s ninth encounter, the match was effectively over. Ju needed only a draw and she played for exactly that: safe, clean and with total command. The queens came off early, the position simplified, and Tan, with no realistic chance of catching up, offered the handshake.
“I was playing more and more in the zone,” Ju said afterward. She credited her team, including grandmasters Ni Hua and Maxim Matlakov, for keeping her steady after the early setback. Tan, meanwhile, acknowledged the weight of the moment. “I think I exposed some of my weaknesses,” she said. “If I want to continue this journey, I’ll have to fix them.”
Both players are set to return to international competition next month: Tan in Austria and Sweden, Ju in Norway.
But for Ju, this win is more than another notch in her résumé. It’s a generational marker. Seven years after first claiming the crown, she has now reigned through an entire cycle of challengers and formats, defending the title at home and abroad and turning back the same opponent who once dethroned her.
