Speed Chess Championship

The Speed Chess Championships are a family of annual blitz chess tournaments held and hosted by the online chess platform Chess.com.

History

The reigning Speed Chess Champion is Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, who has won the main event five times out of seven appearances. American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who has played in every single edition to date, has also won the event five times, consecutively from 2018 to 2022. He had also reached every final until 2024, when he was knocked out in the semifinals for the first time.

Since 2019, Chess.com has also held the Women's and Junior Speed Chess Championships. Chinese grandmaster Ju Wenjun is the reigning Women's Speed Chess Champion, and Indian grandmaster Gukesh Dommaraju is the reigning Junior Speed Chess Champion. In 2020, the Youth Speed Chess Championship and IM Not A GM Speed Chess Championship were introduced as further spin-off events.

The 2024 Finals, for the first time, were held live in Paris. The event attracted media attention due to the matchup between Carlsen and American grandmaster Hans Niemann, which was their first live meeting since their 2022 controversy. Although the players were physically present at the venue, the games were played online on on-site computers in an esports-style format, with a live audience present.

In 2025, Chess.com announced that the winner of the Speed Chess Championship thereafter would be awarded the Naroditsky Cup, in tribute to American grandmaster and commentator Daniel Naroditsky, who died on October 19th, 2025.

List of winners

In the first eight editions, Nakamura only ever lost three matches in the Speed Chess Championship, all of them in the finals against Carlsen. Carlsen has only lost two matches, to Nakamura and Vachier-Lagrave.

From 2020 to 2022, the Women's Speed Chess Championship was jointly presented by Chess.com and FIDE. The event originally served as a qualifier to the main Speed Chess Championship, just like the Junior Speed Chess Championship, but has since been held as a standalone event.

Events by year

2016

The inaugural event was called the Grandmaster Blitz Battle Championship. Carlsen, Nakamura, Vachier-Lagrave, World Blitz Champion Alexander Grischuk, Levon Aronian, Fabiano Caruana and Pentala Harikrishna were invited by Chess.com, while Tigran L. Petrosian entered through a qualifier event. The format for the matches was 90 minutes of 5 minute games with an increment of 2 seconds, followed by 60 minutes of 3 minute games with an increment of 2 seconds, and finally 30 minutes of 1 minute games with a 1-second increment. The first game of each segment was a Chess960 game.

The final, held on October 27, was Carlsen's last public tournament appearance before the classical World Chess Championship 2016. Carlsen won the first segment by a score of 5½-3½, and extended his lead with a 5-2 win in the next segment. Although Nakamura won the final segment by a score of 5-4, Carlsen still won the match convincingly thanks to his wins in the first two segments.

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

2025

The matches in the first two rounds, being held from October 13 to December 4, consisted of 75 minutes of 5 minute games, 50 minutes of 3 minute games, and 25 minutes of 1 minute games. In the semifinals and finals, which were held live in London on February 7–8, 2026, the segments were 90, 60 and 30 minutes long respectively. All the games had an increment of 1 second. Eight players qualified via Titled Tuesday tournaments, while the rest were invited. The prize fund was $250,000. The top three players qualified for the 2026 Esports World Cup.

Notes