The winner of the 2024 TePe Sigeman Chess Tournament, 21-year-old GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov, is one of the main challengers in this year’s tournament.
He recently won the 2026 Tata Steel Masters Tournament, with an impressive 9 points in 13 rounds. He also finished second in the same tournament in 2023 and shared first place in 2024.
He became a GM in 2018, at the age of 13, and in 2021, he won the Rapid Chess World Championship. He played on the first board for the Uzbekistan team in the 2022 Chennai Chess Olympics, in which the Uzbeki team secured a sensational win.
He is participating in the TePe Sigeman Chess Tournament for the second time.