The tournament took place at the Palacio de Santoña in Madrid, Spain, from June 16 to July 5, 2022,[2] with the World Championship finishing in April 2023.

[4] The eight qualifiers were Ian Nepomniachtchi, Teimour Radjabov, Jan-Krzysztof Duda, Alireza Firouzja, Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Richárd Rapport, and Ding Liren.

Sergey Karjakin was originally a qualifier, but was disqualified for breaching the FIDE Code of Ethics after publicly expressing approval of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

[5] This made him one of five players to win consecutive Candidates, the others being Vasily Smyslov, Boris Spassky, Viktor Korchnoi, and Anatoly Karpov.

Nepomniachtchi was scheduled to play a match against Magnus Carlsen for the World Chess Championship.

With the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spreading around the world in early 2020, Radjabov privately asked FIDE to postpone the tournament.

[22][23] Karjakin had the option of a further appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport,[23] but none was submitted before the Candidates Tournament started.

However, Ding had only played 4 of the required 30 rated games[20] due to his inability to travel to tournaments outside China during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He also needed to maintain his rating lead over the next highest non-qualifier – several other players could potentially have overtaken him, including Shakhriyar Mamedyarov and Levon Aronian.

The Chinese Chess Association organized three different rated events at short notice, each involving Ding,[27] thereby allowing him to meet the minimum games requirement.

[9][31] However, Carlsen said following the previous championship in 2021 that, due to a lack of motivation, he might not defend his title unless the challenger was Alireza Firouzja, who rose to number two in the world rankings in 2021 at the age of 18.

[32] After the tournament, FIDE gave a deadline of July 20, 2022 for Carlsen to make a decision before retracting it later calling it a "misunderstanding".

As such, it was not clear if the tournament's runner-up would become the challenger for the 2023 World Chess Championship title match until the event was over.