Rapport Beats Carlsen In 23 Moves As World Rapid Team Favorites Crash To Defeat
GM Richard Rapport scored a stunning victory over World Rapid Champion Magnus Carlsen as WR Chess, the defending champions and heavy favorites to win the 2024 World Rapid & Blitz Team Championships, sank to a 5-1 loss to third-seeded Chessy. Chessy has the only perfect score, with two teams in close pursuit, Al-Ain ACMG UAE and Decade China Team, led by World Champion Ding Liren, who started with 3.5/4.
Day two starts Saturday, August 3, at 5:30 a.m. ET / 11:30 CEST / 3 p.m. IST.
- The World Rapid Team Championship Returns, With Blitz Added
- Rapport Stuns Carlsen As Favorites Crushed
- Ding Liren Finds His Form
The World Rapid Team Championship Returns, With Blitz Added
The three-day FIDE World Rapid Team Championship was held for the first time in August 2023 in Dusseldorf, Germany, and now it's back for a second year in Astana, Kazakhstan. This year it's accompanied by an extra day for a new event, the FIDE World Blitz Team Championship, but the general principles stay the same.
The event is open to any team of six players (selected from a maximum of nine), with no restrictions on the nationality of the competitors. That's one reason why the 40 teams include an astonishing 151 local players from Kazakhstan, with Kyrgyzstan having the next highest contingent of just 13. At the top, however, we have a who's who of the world's best. Here are the top five teams and their top-rated player for Rapid.
Each team fields six players each round and must include at least one female player and—the most unusual part of the whole event—one "recreational player," which is defined as a player who has never crossed a 2,000 rating. That saw Wadim Rosenstein, the sponsor of WR Chess and the event as a whole in Dusseldorf last time, become an official FIDE world champion.
not quite the way I imagined https://t.co/6StZ7rF5KM
— Ian Nepomniachtchi (@lachesisq) August 28, 2023
WR Chess kept the same team in 2024, except for replacing three-time U.S. Chess Champion Wesley So with a certain Carlsen.
The format for the Rapid is simple, with a 12-round Swiss (where teams on equal points, as far as possible, are paired against each other in subsequent rounds) with two match points for a win and one for a draw. Each player has 15 minutes for all their moves, with a 10-second bonus added after each move.
The Blitz has a more complex format, but let's jump that hurdle when we get to it on Monday.
After an opening ceremony that featured WR Chess Team Captain GM Jan Gustafsson throwing a giant marshmallow (!?) to decide the colors...
...it was time for the action to begin!
FIDE World Rapid Team Championship Standings After Day 1
| Rank | Seed | Team | Matches | + | = | - | Score | TB |
| 1 | 3 | Chessy | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 72 |
| 2 | 2 | Decade China Team | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 7 | 81 |
| 3 | 4 | Al-Ain ACMG UAE | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 7 | 71 |
| 4 | 6 | Team MGD1 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 62 |
| 5 | 9 | Q4Rail Kingsofchess Krakow | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 56 |
| 6 | 7 | Ashdod Chess Club | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 55 |
| 7 | 5 | Kazchess | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 53 |
| 8 | 1 | WR Chess Team | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 46.5 |
| 9 | 8 | GMHans.com | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 44 |
| 10 | 11 | Astana-1 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 28 |
Rapport Stuns Carlsen As Favorites Crushed
The big story of day one was the collapse of the previously all-conquering WR Chess Team. Nothing foretold what was to come when they began with a routine 6-0 win over the Kyrgyz Chess Academy. "We have a very modest line-up, so we will fight!" said GM Ian Nepomniachtchi after leading the team in that round-one match. How would Carlsen change the team dynamic? "Even more modest now!"
From there on, however, the day got much tougher for the all-stars. They scraped a 3.5-2.5 win over Royal Chess, with GM Vincent Keymer brilliantly beaten by GM Jakhongir Vakhidov, while Rosenstein began a three-game losing streak.
Carlsen had struggled with flights to get to Kazakhstan but was brought in as reinforcement in round three, and it paid off, as he played a brilliant endgame to grind out a win against GM Arjun Ergaisi, who he'll also take on in the Speed Chess Championship Quarterfinals next week. Still, WR Chess's margin of victory over Team MGD1 was again as tight as it could be, with everything turning on Nepomniachtchi winning a position he'd been losing against GM Narayanan Sunilduth Lyna.
That was just the prelude to the disaster that befell in round four when WR Chess lost 5-1 to Chessy.
The headline result was Carlsen's loss to Rapport, who had already had some fun in his first game of the day!
Can you spot the famous tactic he used to beat GM Nigel Short?
Beating Carlsen with Black was another level entirely, however, especially the way the Hungarian number-one went about it. Carlsen never managed to castle, got horribly entangled, and was down to just two minutes on the clock when 17...Qb5! appeared on the board, leaving the rook on e4 attacked. The point is that after 18.Nxe4 dxe4 the white queen soon stops being able to defend against mate on e2.
The position was a nightmare to defend and Carlsen didn't manage, with Nepomniachtchi expressing the full horror of the moment for his teammate.
Rapport stuns Carlsen (and Nepomniachtchi)!
— International Chess Federation (@FIDE_chess) August 2, 2024
🇭🇺 Richard Rapport beats 🇳🇴 Magnus Carlsen in a crucial win, helping ‘Chessy’ defeat ‘WR Chess Team’ and become the sole leaders after round 4! 🔥
♟️ FIDE World Rapid Team Championship pic.twitter.com/W9Pv78p1oT
That's our Game of the Day, and has been analyzed by GM Rafael Leitao below.
That was the signal for a general collapse for WR Chess, including the world's highest-rated female player also losing, with GM Hou Yifan on the same day suffering losses to Indian stars GMs Harika Dronavalli and Humpy Koneru.
That win ended a near-perfect day for Chessy, whose only two individual losses had been suffered by GM Vidit Gujrathi, who was rested for round four.
Ding Liren Finds His Form
"The chess world is a better place when Aronian is playing well!" 13th World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov once said, and that same statement certainly applies to the current World Champion Ding, whose poor results and depressed demeanor have weighed on the chess world all year. We need him back at his awesome best to make the upcoming world championship match against GM Gukesh Dommaraju a great spectacle, and what better place to recover than in the city where he won the title?
Ding beat Hans.
— Anish Giri (@anishgiri) August 2, 2024
If that is not a comeback, then I don't know what is. https://t.co/zyjAqu2dfU
Ding powered to 3/3, with his win over GM Hans Niemann in round three a great example of grinding out a win in a pawn-up endgame, even if, curiously, the resignation in the final position may have been premature.
Final moments: Ding Liren 1-0 Hans Niemann https://t.co/5pwXq8q0ho pic.twitter.com/wWGVEG0SA1
— International Chess Federation (@FIDE_chess) August 2, 2024
It was a tough day for Niemann, who had also been hit by a brilliancy from Turkmenistan GM Meilis Annaberdiev, who pulled off one of the few surprises of round one.
Niemann's team won that match and two more, however, while in the final round of the day it was Ding who let his opponent off lightly when he made a draw against GM Daniil Dubov from a dynamic position where he had the better chances.
That saw Decade China Team (GM Peter Leko mentioned that might refer to the decade since China won their first FIDE Chess Olympiad, in Tromso) held to a 3-3 draw by the team with which they share second place, Al-Ain ACMG UAE, but 3.5/4 was a great start, and Ding then went to play some football.
Four intense rounds of rapid chess were not enough to wear out the World Champion Ding Liren 🇨🇳
— International Chess Federation (@FIDE_chess) August 2, 2024
Right after the first day of play at the FIDE World Rapid Team Championship ended, he joined other chess players in a friendly football match! 🔥 ⚽ pic.twitter.com/4TP8ibKci0
Spirits seem high on the team, with Women's World Champion Ju Wenjun making an unbeaten 3/4.
🇨🇳 Women’s World Champion Ju Wenjun before her game starts vs her 🇨🇳 teammates before their games start! pic.twitter.com/Qd39lmCffb
— International Chess Federation (@FIDE_chess) August 2, 2024
Nothing is decided yet with eight rounds to go, however, and you may underestimate some of the "lesser" teams at your peril. Rookies is seeded 16th, but pulled off the shock of round two.
That was wins for 15-year-old GM Ediz Gurel, 13-year-old GM-elect Ivan Zemlyanskii, and 17-year-old Read Samadov. CM Roman Shogdzhiev, born in 2015, and WCM Alanna Berikkyzy, born in 2014, missed out on this occasion. Rookies, indeed!
How to watch?
The live broadcast was hosted by GMs Peter Leko, Irina Krush, and Evgenij Miroshnichenko.
The 2024 FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Team Championships run August 2-5 in Astana, Kazakhstan, with 40 teams of six players competing. Each team must feature at least one female player and one "recreational player," never rated 2000+. The Rapid is a 12-round Swiss with a time control of 15 minutes for all moves, plus a 10-second increment per move. The Blitz (3+2) begins with teams playing a round-robin in pools, before the top 16 play a knockout, where each clash features two mini-matches.
Colin McGourty led news at Chess24 from its launch until it merged with Chess.com a decade later. An amateur player, he got into chess writing when he set up the website Chess in Translation after previously studying Slavic languages and literature in St. Andrews, Odesa, Oxford, and Krakow.
