3 min readMumbaiUpdated: Apr 16, 2026 11:44 PM IST After a phase of two years, where almost nothing went right for her, Vaishali Rameshbabu delivered the biggest hit of her career by winning the cut-throat Women’s Candidates tournament. Plenty has been said about how Vaishali was the lowest-rated player in the eight-woman field. But a true measure of just how much of a Cinderella tale her victory at Cyprus was can be drawn by the fact that she will still leave the Mediterranean island as the lowest-rated player among the eight, despite gaining 26 ELO points over the course of two weeks while most of the others lost rating. The win means Vaishali is only the second Indian woman in history who will compete at the Women’s World Championship after Koneru Humpy in Tirana in 2011. One of the early believers in the 24-year-old Vaishali’s talent was five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand, who named her in the first cohort of his chess school (Westbridge Anand Chess Academy). In fact, Vaishali was the only female prodigy …