Magnus Carlsen & Kateryna Lagno win World Blitz Championship
Magnus Carlsen won the World Blitz Chess Championship with an impressive score of 17 points from 21 games. He took the lead from 10 and retained it until the end to go home with USD 60,000.
Duda Jan-Krzysztof who chased Magnus all the way from round 12 ended with 16.5 points in 2nd place to go home with USD 50,000.
Nakamura Hikaru was third with 14.5 points went home with USD 40,000.
Kateryna Lagno of Russia won the Ladies section with a score of 13.5 points from 17 games. She also went through without a single loss and won USD 40,000.
Sarasadat Khademaisharieh of Iran was second with 13 points and she went home with USD 30,000.
Tingjie Lei of China was third with 12.5 points and earned USD 20,000.
Players from Africa
Adly Ahmed was a star performer as he ended with 13 points and in position 20. Adly defeated some big names on his way and included Nakamura Hikaru and Sergey Karjakin!
GM Amin Bassem of Egypt (2603) ended in position 47 with a respectable 12 points out of 21 games.
IM Mohamed Tissir of Morocco ended in position 153 with 9 points out of 15 games.
Ahmed Hassan Abdillahi (1570) of Djibouti who played in the Rapid Championship did not take part in the Blitz Championship.
Adly Ahmed v Sergey Karjakin
Nakamura Hikaru v Adly Ahmed
Unsung heroes
An event with about 330 players would require a huge number of unsung heroes working in the background to keep the event running as per plan. These would include the arbiters and the helpers.
The other heroes are those who kept us well entertained of what was going on in St Petersburg with their photographs.
Special thanks
This event was a massive success despite the incredibly short time to set it up. FIDE and the Russian Chess Federation can be proud of their achievement as this event had most of the world’s best players taking part.
The main sponsor was King Salman of Saudi Arabia. Other sponsors included Gazprom,Russian Railways, Sberbank, & PhosAgro
Links
Dubov & Wenjun win Rapid World Championship
Photos of World Rapid & Blitz Championship
World Rapid & Blitz Championship Day 2 Report
Introductory Report on World Rapid & Blitz Championship
Gazprom http://www.gazprom.com/
Russian Railways http://eng.rzd.ru/
Sberbank https://www.sberbank.ru/en/
PhosAgro https://www.phosagro.com/