World Rapid & Blitz Champions
A separate champion lineage from the classical title — faster time controls, and a different, often less predictable set of winners.
Scope Note
This page is a summary, not a full year-by-year list like the Champions and Women's Champions sections — the event runs annually across four separate categories (open and women's, rapid and blitz), which adds up to a lot of individual champions very quickly. Rather than pad this out with thin entries, here's the honest shape of the event's history.
History
FIDE has run a combined World Rapid and World Blitz Chess Championship as an annual event since 2012 (skipping only 2020). Unlike the classical World Championship, it isn't decided by a single challenger match — it's an open, multi-day tournament that any sufficiently strong player can enter, which tends to produce a wider, less predictable spread of winners from year to year.
The Standout: Magnus Carlsen
One player has dominated this event far beyond anyone else in either the open Rapid or Blitz Championship: Magnus Carlsen has won the World Rapid Championship six times and the World Blitz Championship nine times — both records by a wide margin, and both still actively growing. Other open-section champions across the event's history include Viswanathan Anand, Sergey Karjakin, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Vasyl Ivanchuk, Daniil Dubov, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, and Volodar Murzin.
Why It's Worth Following Separately
Rapid and blitz chess reward a different, faster kind of skill than classical chess — deep preparation matters less, and pattern recognition, intuition, and time-pressure composure matter more. It's not unusual for a player far outside the classical elite to have a breakout run at Rapid or Blitz Worlds, which is part of why the event has become such a fixture of the modern competitive calendar alongside the classical World Championship.