FIDE World Team Rapid and Blitz Championships 2026 in Hong Kong
The fourth edition of the FIDE World Team Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships will be held in Hong Kong from 16 to 22 June 2026. After successful events in Düsseldorf (2023), Almaty (2024), and London (2025), the tournament returns with its distinctive format that brings elite grandmasters and amateur players together within the same team structure. In that sense, the event stands apart from traditional team competitions and has become one of the most compelling fixtures in modern chess.
The most striking feature of the championship is its mixed-team format. Each team competes on six boards and must include at least one female player and at least one recreational player. The definition of a recreational player is clear: someone who has never reached a 2000 FIDE rating in standard, rapid, or blitz. This rule allows world stars, rising talents, and passionate amateurs to fight for the same goal side by side. Especially in rapid and blitz time controls, where practical decision-making, clock management, and positional intuition often matter more than deep opening memorization, this format significantly increases the entertainment value for fans.
The results of recent years underline the level of competition. In Almaty 2024, Al-Ain ACMG UAE won the rapid title, while Magnus Carlsen’s WR Chess Team captured the blitz crown. In the 2025 London edition, Team MGD1, featuring Arjun Erigaisi, lifted the rapid trophy, while WR Chess Team successfully defended its blitz title for a second consecutive year thanks to powerful performances from Alireza Firouzja, Hikaru Nakamura, and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. These results show that the event is not merely a spectacle, but a prestigious team competition taken very seriously by the world’s best players.
The 2026 Hong Kong edition is already shaping up to feature the strongest lineups yet. WR Chess Team has confirmed an imposing roster with Magnus Carlsen returning on board one, Fabiano Caruana on board two, and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave also joining the squad. On the women’s boards, Hou Yifan and Alexandra Kosteniuk remain in place. With reigning rapid champions MGD1, strong contenders such as Hexamind, and other leading teams expected to return, fierce battles are anticipated in both rapid and blitz. Opportunities to play alongside super-grandmaster teams are extremely rare in the chess calendar, which is why Hong Kong 2026 already looks set to become one of the standout events of the year for the global visibility of chess and the appeal of team competition.