World Blitz Championship

The World Blitz Chess Championship is a tournament held to determine the world champion in chess played under blitz time controls. Since 2012, FIDE has held an annual joint rapid and blitz chess tournament and billed it as the World Rapid & Blitz Chess Championships. The current world blitz champion is Russian grandmaster Sergey Karjakin.

Starting in the early 1900s, chess clubs began to organize tournament played at accelerated time controls; these early games usually required a set number of moves from each player within a certain time interval. One of the earliest examples was the local chess club at Hastings, England where 10 seconds were allowed per-move during a blitz tournament held after the 1904 British Chess Championship. By 1950, the time controls had changed to the familiar five minutes per player, hence the "five-minute game" moniker; the term "blitz chess" would not be coined until the 1960s.

The first blitz chess tournament to be recognized by FIDE as a "world championship" took place on 6 September 2006 in Rishon Lezion, Israel. Structured as a 16-player round-robin, the tournament featured seven of the world's top 20 Grandmasters, as well as a young Magnus Carlsen. After 15 rounds, Alexander Grischuk and Peter Svidler finished atop the leaderboard with 10½/15; Grischuk subsequently defeated Svidler with Black in an armageddon game to win the championship. The following year, the tournament (now branded as the FIDE World Blitz Cup) was held in Moscow, Russia following the Tal Memorial tournament and was re-structured as a 20-player double-round robin with a significantly stronger field. After Ukrainian grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk and Indian grandmaster Viswanathan Anand entered the final round tied on points, Ivanchuk defeated Anand from a disadvantaged position to win the tournament with 25½/38.

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