Hive Festive chess results || Magnus Carlsen wins 2025 Rapid Championship in Qatar

Hello everyone,

Few days ago we played the Hive chess tournament. The tournament was played on the 27th! It was a good one, we had 34 players join the event.

Congratulations to IM @maestroask for winning and the hive chess twins @dalods and @dakods for 2nd and 3rd place positions respectively.

Everyone is a winner and prizes will be paid 7 days after this post pay out. Congratulations to everyone.

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As a fan of the game of chess, the name Magnus Carlsen should not be strange to your ears. He is the G.O.A.T. of modern chess. Having 19 championships to his name and countless tournament wins, it was not surprising to see that he won the 2025 World Rapid championship after going on an unbeaten run after his loss to Artemiev.

Image from Japan Times

The Rapid Chess championship is not a small ball game with the best of the best playing at the event to claim the title in their name. I am talking about super grandmasters with impressive chess ratings of 2800, 2700, and 2600, all competing under one roof for a title, the world champion in the field of rapid chess. Yet there is one man who has won it a couple of times, and this time he did it again, which was interesting to watch. I am impressed by how confident he is to play chess after a loss. It is not about the win but how you recover from the loss to head off to the next game.

In rapid chess, where time is not in surplus like classical chess, Magnus Carlsen stayed focused on the squeezing of his opponent, taking every little advantage he got and pushing hard until the final moment of loss for his opponent. He did not play anything flashy with all aggressive attacks, rather he stayed calm with his gradual development, and wherever he got a sniff of inaccurate he pounded with his pieces until there was nothing left but a win for him. His game was a product of steady positional play, mostly a couple of queenside openings, and when he played a kingside opening, it was one of those that required positional understanding.

Image from FIDE

That was not all, while other players were having a period of mixed wins and losses, Magnus stayed grounded to the wins and knew when to take the draw against direct rivals for the tournament. Rapid chess can be quite tough because you have to pay attention to your time management skills as well, especially when it enters the crucial point below 2 minutes. It is when the time is below 3 minutes and 1 minute that you get to see players rushing, and this period is when the blunders occur. Even though there is added time, when the blunder occurs, the time is no longer a problem.

By round 7 of the tournament, when Magnus lost the game to Artemiev, it was a crucial turning point in deciding whether to keep fighting or simply succumb to defeat. This is a turning point for every chess player participating in a tournament. It becomes daring to see how you manage to react to a painful loss and still comport yourself to a better performance towards the remaining rounds of the game you have to play. This was what it was for Magnus Carlsen, but the action he pulled off was what was super impressive to me. Going on a 5-round winning streak after the loss. This speaks a lot about how strong he is mentally, like he said that he is a dangerous man on the board when he is in that zone of confidence, and that is exactly what he pulled off. Then he rounded the tournament with a draw against Anish Giri in the last round since he was a full point ahead of all the players heading into the last round, so all he needed was a draw to claim the title.

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_{I am @samostically, a chess player and writer. I love to share the experience I have gained from different battles over the 64 squares and the knowledgeable insights from books I have read. But most importantly, I am a Midnight Owl and I founded the community Midnight Letters.}

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Thanks For Reading!