Dragon Chilling wins Fide World Team Rapid and Blitz Championships - Caissa Team participates
- Coach Emile
- Jul 18
- 4 min read
A unicum in Hong Kong: The FIDE World Team Rapid and Blitz Championships. A relatively new concept introduced a couple of years ago that brings the world's greatest players together. In 2026, Hong Kong hosted this event in the Queen Elizabeth Stadium. Rapid is played over twelve rounds in Swiss format. For the Blitz tournaments, the teams are split into four round robin pools with a grand final on Sunday. One special rule for this event: each round six players from a squad of nine players have to be selected to play. Each composition needs to have one amateur player (U2000) and one female player. Those players need to be on two separate boards.
Rapid day 1
We were joined by 2012 World Junior Champion Alexander Ipatov to have a competitive lineup in this special event. The quality and pressure of top level chess is extremely high and we lost the first match 0-6 nonetheless. Endgame.AI, led by top grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann proved to be a couple of classes too high. We finished the first day with one win out of four matches. Alexander and Wing Ki Kwong (James) had the most solid performances, both scoring two points.
Rapid day 2
The second day was no less forgiving, but this time we managed to score two wins! After losing against Malaysia Chess Hub, we scored wins against Beijing Yijia Chess Club and Davao Chess Eagles. Chongqing Kylin Chess Club was too strong for us in the final round of the day. James was once again the star of the day with 2.5/3 while Coach Matthew was warming up and scored a very decent 2/4 on board 2.
Rapid day 3
Also on the final Rapid day, we scored two team wins. Team Perfect was the first victim of the day with a 5.5-0.5 scoreline in our favour. Then we exchanged the closest difference, once in our favour, once to our disadvantage: a 2.5-3.5 loss against Shenzhen Qiyu Chess Club followed by a 3.5-2.5 win against Wizard Manpower – Pilipinas.
We finished the tournament with a loss against Indonesia. James scored another solid 2/3 to become our team's top scorer with 6.5/9 while Coach Emile corrected his slow start with a strong 4/4 finish to score 5.5/9.
Ding Liren's team Dragon Chilling - the local fan favourites - won the tournament. They scored eight wins, two draws and two losses. The same as Team MGD1 (Arjun Erigaisi) and Hexamind (Alireza Firouzja, Levon Aronian), but with a higher tiebreak.
Blitz day 1
The fun about the blitz section is that you're guaranteed to play a couple of top teams. We started against Sky Chess with Shant Sargsyan on board 1. Alexander avoided the team nill score score with a draw, but everyone else had to admit their opponent was stronger. In the second game MGD1 awaited. A team with some of India's top names, you can guess it, no handouts or honour saving draws was the verdict. Hungrily waiting for some boardpoints and a first matchpoint, Malaysia Chess Hub was the opponent in the third round and a close 3.5-2.5 win was ours! Continuing on that roll, we also defeated Chess In Shanghai and drew with Quadcore+.
In round six we had the chance to play with Uzbekistan, featuring some of the moment's hottest players like Javokhir Sindarov (the upcoming World Championship Challenger) and Nodirbek Abdusattorov (the nr. 5 player in the world). Abdusattorov sat this one out, but they have many more talents lined up. Needless to say, we didn't score a point, but it was great fun to compete with these world class names.
The highlight came in round 9. We faced the Hexamind Chess Team with Levon Aronian, Anish Giri, Volodar Murzin, Santosh Gujrathi Vidit, Divya Deshmukh and Murat Omarov in the lineup.
Coach Matthew outplayed Giri in the opening and was even a queen up at some point before Giri showed why he is a world class player and took the full point home. Coach Emile was on equal footing with Vidit for a long time, but succumbed under time pressure. The real hero of the round was Alexander who beat Levon Aronian with the Black pieces!
With also defeating GMs Arkadij Naiditsch in round 10 and Yunguo Wan in round 11, under the supervising eye of Captain at interim Chan Chi Ngo (Declan), Alexander finished in style to become our top scorer with 7/11. Declan had a difficult event so far, only scoring one draw after squandering a couple of very promising positions. It only goes to show how competitive this environment is to play in. He was more than happy to claim the three wins we scored in the final game for himself as Captain!
Coach Emile was a very happy player after the event with a good 5/10 score, while James and Coach Matthew built on their rapid performances with 4/10 and 4/11 scores respectively.
Blitz day 2
For our team there was no playing on day 2, but we were more than happy to gather to watch the finals and prize ceremony together! We saw how Dragon Chilling clinched their second world title in a week, racing through the playoffs.
A visibly emotional Ju Wenjun and Ding Liren accepted the trophies for their team, it was clear how much this meant for them.
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