Hot on the heels of the FIDE World Championship that saw Dommaraju Gukesh crowned (classical) chess champion of the world comes FIDE’s World Championship for the two faster versions of the sport: rapid and blitz.
The 2024 FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Championship will be held from December 26 (early December 27 in India) to December 31 (early January 1 in India) in Wall Street, New York. And we have the low down for the C’ship right here:
Format
The Rapid Championships will follow a Swiss system*. How it works is that players are not eliminated after losses and are instead, they are re-paired in each round to play against opponents with a similar score. Each player will go through 13 rounds via this system in the open section, and 11 in the women’s section, and the player with the highest score at the end wins.
The Blitz will also start with 13 and 11 rounds (for Open and Women respectively) but after that there’s a twist. The top 8 after the players after this stage go to stage 2 – which will be a traditional knockout format to determine the winner.
*The Swiss system is implemented to make tournaments more exciting (pairing players with similar form in each round) and less time consuming (round-robin with everyone would simply take too long).
Time Controls
Rapid will see games played in 15-minute time controls, with players gaining an additional 10-second increment per move (from the first move itself).
Blitz, as the name suggests, will be even quicker, with 3-minute time controls and a 2-second increment per move (from the first move itself).
Favourites – Open
All the big names — apart from newly crowned world champion D Gukesh and the man he dethroned, Ding Liren — will be there in New York, but the overwhelming favourite remains defending rapid and blitz champion Magnus Carlsen.
Coming off defending his Champions Tour crown, he’s in fine form and will want to show the world what they missed out on at the World Championship battle in Singapore. Who, though, could possibly challenge His GOATness?
Well, we’ll let Carlsen himself tell you (via the TakeTakeTake channel) about who he sees as his biggest rivals:
Rapid: Hikaru Nakamura, Alireza Firouzja, Fabiano Caruana, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Arjun Erigaisi. And he also mentioned Wesley So, although he added “he maybe makes a little too many draws for this format.”
Blitz: “Many of the same names (he also included Ian Nepomniachtchi, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, and Daniil Dubov in addition) … but clearly it’s Hikaru, Alireza and then everybody else.”
In case you wanted more than just the defending champ’s assessment, here are the top 5 as per their FIDE ratings:
Rapid — Carlsen, Ding (not there), Caruna, Vachier-Legrave and Wei Yi.
Blitz — Carlsen, Firouzja, Nakamura, So, Caruana.
Favourites – Women
The usual suspects are in fine form, and they’ll be exceptionally hard to look past. To understand what we mean by usual suspects, just have a look at the top five rated women’s players for rapid and blitz in the world:
Rapid: Hou Yifan, Ju Wenjun Lei Tingjie, Tan Zhongyi, Aleksandra Goryachkina.
Blitz: Hou, Lei, Tan, Ju, Alexandra Kosteniuk.
Of course, ratings only go so far and there will be real threats to the Chinese from Goryachkina, Kosteniuk, defending champions Anastasia Bodnaruk and Valentina Gunina as well as former champs Kateryna Lagno and Bibisara Assaubayeva.
India’s Divya Deshmukh (one of ESPN’s emerging athletes of the year, incidentally) will lead the charge for the Olympiad champions as they look to convert their collective classical chess dominance to individual success in the faster formats. Former champ Koneru Humpy will certainly be one to watch out for.
Indians
What about the Indians you ask? Chess’ new powerhouse will be well represented at the Worlds. Arjun Erigaisi is in the form of his life, and will lead the charge but here’s the full list of Indian participants:
Open – Arjun Erigaisi, R Praggnanandhaa, Raunak Sadhwani, Sandipan Chanda, Aravindh Chithambaram, Harsha Bharathakoti, Pranav V, Bharath Subramaniyam, Diptayan Ghosh and Karthik Venkataraman.
Women – Humpy Koneru, Harika Dronavalli, Divya Deshmukh, Vaishali Rameshbabu, Vantika Agrawal, Sahithi Varshini M, Padmini Rout, and Priyanka Nutakki.
Former Winners**
Be warned, you’ll see one name repeated very often here:
Rapid, Open: Sergey Karjakin (2012), Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (2013), Carlsen (2014), Carlsen (2015), Vasyl Ivanchuk (2016), Viswanathan Anand (2017), Dubov (2018), Carlsen (2019), Abdusattorov (2019), Carlsen (2022), Carlsen (2023).
Blitz, Open: Alexander Grischuk, Le Quang Liem, Carlsen, Grischuk, Karjakin, Carlsen, Carlsen, Carlsen, Vachier-Lagrave, Carlsen, Carlsen.
Rapid, Women: Stefanova Antoaneta (2012), Kateryna Lagno (2014), Anna Muzychuk (2016), Ju Wenjun (2017), Ju (2018), Koneru Humpy (2019), Alexandra Kosteniuk (2021), Tan Zhongyi (2022), Bodnaruk (2023).
Blitz, Women: Gunina, Muzychuk, Muzychuk, Nana Dzagnidze, Lagno, Lagno, Assaubayeva, Assaubayeva, Gunina
**This list only includes winners of the World Rapid and Blitz Championship in its current iteration (i.e since 2012)
Schedule – Rapid
Timings in IST December 27
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12.30 AM: Round 1
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1.50 AM: Round 2
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3.10 AM: Round 3
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4.30 AM: Round 4
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5.50 AM: Round 5
December 28 Rounds 6, 7, 8, 9 in the same time slots as above (excluding the 5.50 AM one.)
December 29 Rounds 10, 11, 12, 13 in the same time slots as above.
Schedule – Blitz
December 31
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12.30 AM: Round 1
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1.00 AM: Round 2
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1.30 AM: Round 3
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2.00 AM: Round 4
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2.30 AM: Round 5
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3.00 AM: Round 6
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3.30 AM: Round 7
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4.00 AM: Round 8
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4.30 AM: Round 9
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5.00 AM: Round 10
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5.30 AM: Round 11
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6.00 AM: Round 12
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6.30 AM: Round 13
January 1
• 12.30 AM: Quarterfinals
• 2.00 AM: Semifinals
• 3.30 AM: Final
Livestream
The tournament will be livestreamed on the official FIDE YouTube channel.
