Samarkand's First Big Test: The 2023 World Rapid and Blitz Championships

A dress for the main event

In November 2023, FIDE announced that the year's last big chess tournament — the World Rapid and Blitz Championships — would be held in Samarkand. The decision came just eight weeks before the event. A Norwegian grandmaster called the late announcement "hopeless and amateurish" in the press. Players who needed visas for Uzbekistan had little time to prepare.

But there was another reason to bring the chess world to Samarkand at the end of 2023, and most observers understood it. The 46th Chess Olympiad had been awarded to Uzbekistan a year earlier. Samarkand would be the host city. Whatever happened in December 2023 — for five days, with one million dollars in prize money, the entire chess elite (with two notable exceptions), and the FIDE president personally on the stage — would tell everyone what to expect from September 2026.

This is what happened.

Table of contents

• The venue: Silk Road Samarkand
• Open Rapid: Carlsen's fifth title
• Open Blitz: six wins in a row
• Women's Rapid: an IM beats nineteen GMs
• Women's Blitz: Gunina from start to finish
• Who wasn't there
• The Uzbek hopes at home
• What 2023 told us about 2026
• Frequently asked questions
• Sources and further reading

The venue: Silk Road Samarkand

The Samarkand Congress Center, where every game of the 2023 championships was played, sits inside a larger complex called Silk Road Samarkand. The complex covers around 280 hectares on the eastern side of the city, fifteen minutes by car from Samarkand International Airport. It was built in the early 2020s as Uzbekistan's flagship international tourism project, intended specifically to host large global events.

The Congress Center itself is a single building of over 28,000 square metres, designed in what the developers call "oriental style" — large panoramic windows, decorative arches, conference halls named after precious stones (Ruby, Emerald, Pearl, and so on) that were traded along the historical Silk Road. The main hall can hold over a thousand participants and spectators. Around it sit four hotels, including the five-star Samarkand Regency Amir Temur and the Silk Road by Minyoun, where most of the players stayed during the championship.

For FIDE, the choice of venue was deliberate. President Arkady Dvorkovich said in the official announcement: "Samarkand was a pivotal city along the historical Silk Road trade route and also holds historical significance for chess: it was in this city where the earliest known chess pieces were discovered in 1977." The reference is to ivory chess pieces dug up at the Afrasiab archaeological site, dated to between the 6th and early 8th century AD.

The opening ceremony took place on 25 December 2023. Former world champion Viswanathan Anand provided live commentary from the venue — his first time commentating on a World Rapid and Blitz. Alisher Sadullayev, president of the Uzbekistan Chess Federation, made the ceremonial first move in the Open section. Dvorkovich himself made it in the Women's section. Play began the next day.

Open Rapid: Carlsen's fifth title

The Open Rapid ran from 26 to 28 December, thirteen rounds of Swiss-system chess across three days. One hundred and fifty players took part, including more than thirty rated above 2700. The defending champion Magnus Carlsen was the top seed at 2818.

The first two days produced a familiar shape. Carlsen took half a point from his first game against the lower-rated Nikita Petrov of Montenegro, then ground through the field with the patient endgame play he has used to win four previous World Rapid titles. "My play is so-so, but my score is just great," he told Norwegian broadcaster NRK at the end of day one. By the start of day three, he was tied for first with Vladimir Fedoseev (representing Slovenia) and Yu Yangyi of China, each on 7 out of 9.

The third day decided everything. In round 10, Carlsen beat Fedoseev in the direct meeting of co-leaders. In round 11, he beat Pouya Idani of Iran. That gave him a half-point lead with two rounds to go. In round 12 he faced Nodirbek Abdusattorov — the local hero, the player who had beaten Carlsen in the same tournament two years earlier in Warsaw to take the title at age 17. This time, with Black and the lead, Carlsen quickly offered a draw. Abdusattorov accepted. "In 2023, Carlsen took no chances," chess.com reported.

The final round was a 23-move draw against Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, securing first place on 10 out of 13. Carlsen finished undefeated — seven wins, six draws, no losses. The fifth World Rapid title was his, along with the $60,000 first prize.

Behind him, the silver and bronze fights were dramatic. Fedoseev produced what Carlsen later called "two incredible turnarounds" — wins from losing positions against Nihal Sarin and Vidit Gujrathi on the final day — to take silver on 9.5 out of 13. Yu Yangyi finished on 9 out of 13, tied with eleven other players including Fabiano Caruana, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Levon Aronian, Peter Svidler, Richard Rapport and Anish Giri. Yu had the best tiebreaks, taking bronze. Caruana was thirteenth on tiebreaks despite sharing the same score.

Open Blitz: six wins in a row

The Blitz event ran on 29 and 30 December — twenty-one rounds in two days, with 206 players competing under a three-minute plus two-second time control. The prize for first place: $90,000.

Carlsen started in his usual way — strongly, but not perfectly. The first day brought controversy when GMs Daniil Dubov and Ian Nepomniachtchi played a three-move draw in round eleven that the arbiters ruled a deliberately prearranged result. Both players received a half-point penalty. The dispute delayed the publication of standings for several hours.

On the second day, Carlsen lost his first game. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave beat him in round 13 with the white pieces. After the loss, Carlsen took a walk by the artificial lake outside the Congress Center. He came back into the hall and won six games in a row — against Alexey Sarana, Arjun Erigaisi, Aleksandar Indjic, Yu Yangyi, Jan-Krzysztof Duda, and Richard Rapport. "Why did you have to make Magnus Carlsen angry this morning?" a fan posted on X to Vachier-Lagrave.

Two draws in the final rounds were enough. Carlsen took first place on 16 out of 21 — his seventh World Blitz title, his seventeenth world championship of any kind. Dubov finished second on 15.5 with wins over Abdusattorov and Caruana on the final day. Vladislav Artemiev took bronze on 15. Vachier-Lagrave, the one player who beat Carlsen in either rapid or blitz, finished outside the medals.

At the awards ceremony at the Silk Road Samarkand hotel complex, Carlsen — visibly tired after thirty-four games in five days — accepted both championship cups. "Honestly, I just feel very tired at the moment," he told the press conference. "The feeling of happiness will come later."

Women's Rapid: an IM beats nineteen GMs

The Women's Rapid played out at the same time as the Open, with eleven rounds across three days. The field of forty-eight included the defending champion Tan Zhongyi of China, the world women's number two Humpy Koneru of India, and former world champions Alexandra Kosteniuk and Mariya Muzychuk. There were nineteen grandmasters in the field.

Three rounds from the end, Anastasia Bodnaruk — a Russian International Master, not a grandmaster, rated 2265 — was leading. She held the lead through the final day with three straight draws, finishing on 8.5 out of 11. The same score brought Humpy Koneru and the 2023 World Championship runner-up Lei Tingjie level with her.

Under tournament regulations, only the top two players on tiebreaks went to the playoff. Lei had the lowest tiebreak score of the three and was excluded. She had played a three-move draw with Black against Bodnaruk in the final round, accepting the position. Whether she realised that, unlike the Open, the Women's playoff regulations excluded the third-tied player is not clear.

The playoff was a four-game blitz match. Humpy won the first. Bodnaruk replied immediately with a win as Black in a wild middlegame. The third game was a draw. The fourth was decided when Humpy, with a piece up and a winning position, moved her king to the wrong square. Bodnaruk won on time after Humpy lost the thread.

Final score 2.5 to 1.5 to Bodnaruk. She became the first International Master in history to win the Women's World Rapid Championship. "Humpy played better than me, but I played faster," Bodnaruk said at the press conference. "This was my way to success." Lei Tingjie collected the bronze.

Women's Blitz: Gunina from start to finish

The Women's Blitz lasted two days and seventeen rounds. The defending champion was Bibisara Assaubayeva of Kazakhstan, the holder of the title for the previous two years. The favourites included Humpy Koneru, the four-time Women's World Champion Ju Wenjun of China, and the 2023 World Cup winner Aleksandra Goryachkina of Russia.

Valentina Gunina of Russia did not look like the favourite at the start. She had won the World Women's Blitz once before — in Batumi in 2012, more than eleven years earlier. She was thirty-four years old. She had taken silver in the same event twice. In Samarkand she opened with seven consecutive wins — including against the defending champion Assaubayeva in round four. By the end of day one she had 8.5 out of 9 and a one-and-a-half-point lead over the field.

The second day was harder. Gunina lost to Zhu Jiner of China in round fifteen, her only defeat. Alexandra Kosteniuk, scoring well behind her, pulled within half a point with two rounds to go. Then Gunina won the round-sixteen game against Ju Wenjun and the round-seventeen game against Anna Muzychuk — the two-time Women's World Blitz champion. Both wins gave her outright first place on 14 out of 17, half a point ahead of Kosteniuk.

It was her second Women's World Blitz title. Zhu Jiner took bronze on 12.5. Assaubayeva, the defending champion, finished sixth.

For Russia, the result completed an unusual sweep: Russian players had won both Women's titles at the championships, while the Open titles went to Norway. Russia's chess federation president Andrey Filatov publicly praised both Bodnaruk and Gunina for "glorifying the Russian school of chess."

Who wasn't there

Two of the strongest players in the world were missing from Samarkand.

Ding Liren of China — the reigning World Chess Champion in classical chess after defeating Ian Nepomniachtchi in April 2023 — did not play. ChessBase listed him together with one other notable absence: "With the notable exception of world champion Ding Liren and Hikaru Nakamura, almost all of the strongest figures in the chess realm will be in Samarkand."

Nakamura's absence was the more debated one. As one of the top blitz players in the world for years, he was a natural contender for the Open Blitz title and an opponent Carlsen would have had to beat to win double gold. He did not travel. The reasons for the absence were not made public in detail.

The missing names mattered. Carlsen's seventh World Blitz title — and his record 17th world championship of any kind — was won without the player widely considered his strongest blitz challenger on the planet. In future editions of the championship, including the 2024 World Rapid and Blitz in New York (where Nakamura did play), the picture would look different.

For Samarkand as a host city, the absences were also a signal. Some of the world's strongest players had decided that the venue was not where they wanted to spend the end of 2023. Visa requirements for Uzbekistan, the late announcement of the venue, and individual scheduling all played a part. The 2026 Olympiad, decided four years in advance, would not face the same problem.

The Uzbek hopes at home

Two players carried Uzbekistan's hopes in the Open. Nodirbek Abdusattorov, then aged 19, played as the highest-rated home player. He had won the World Rapid title in 2021, beating Carlsen along the way, and held one of the strongest blitz records of any player born after 2000. Javokhir Sindarov, 18, was the other young Uzbek hope — a grandmaster since age 12, already a regular on the elite circuit.

Neither won a medal. Abdusattorov's quiet draw with Carlsen in round 12 of the Rapid, in front of a packed local crowd, was one of the most-watched games of the event. The atmosphere in the hall when the two players sat down was — by the accounts of every reporter present — the loudest moment of the championship. A two-year-old story of an Uzbek teenager beating the world champion still had the audience's full attention.

For both Uzbek players, the championships served a different purpose. The 2026 Olympiad would be played at the same venue, at the same complex, with the same audience watching. Samarkand 2023 was, for the home team, the first chance to play under the conditions they would face two and a half years later.

What 2023 told us about 2026

A note from the editor: what follows is editorial observation rather than a claim drawn from any single cited source. The 2023 championships were not officially framed as a rehearsal for the 2026 Olympiad. But several things the event demonstrated are worth noting in advance of September 2026.

First, the Silk Road Samarkand complex worked. The Congress Center handled over 350 players plus officials, journalists, family members, and spectators across five days without major operational issues. The four nearby hotels absorbed the accommodation. The fifteen-minute drive from the airport made travel logistics simple by international tournament standards. By the time FIDE inspected the venue again before the Olympiad in early 2026, the same infrastructure was deemed ready for a tournament with around two hundred federations — twenty times the federation count of the 2023 championships, though with smaller numbers per federation.

Second, the local audience showed up. Carlsen's draw with Abdusattorov, the Bodnaruk-Humpy playoff, the awards ceremony — every chess.com and FIDE photo from the event shows packed crowds. For an Olympiad whose marketing depends partly on local engagement, this was a useful signal. Samarkand was not going to be Carlsen-in-Doha-2025 with empty stands.

Third, the visa and announcement issues that had frustrated some 2023 participants were unlikely to repeat for 2026. Olympiad invitations go out years in advance. National federations handle travel logistics for their teams. The decision-window-of-two-months problem that produced Christiansen's "hopeless and amateurish" comment in 2023 was a feature of the 2023 organisation, not of Samarkand as a host.

Fourth, the absences in 2023 raised questions that 2026 would have to answer differently. An Olympiad is a federation event, not an individual event. The strongest players play for their teams. The question is not "will Carlsen come?" but "will Norway send their strongest team?" That question is currently answered by FIDE's registration timeline: open since 20 April 2026, closing in summer.

The 2023 championships ended on 30 December with the awards ceremony at the Silk Road Samarkand hotel complex. Carlsen and Gunina collected their cups. Bodnaruk thanked her family. The FIDE delegation returned to its headquarters in Lausanne to begin the long preparation for what would come next.

Two years and nine months later, on 15 September 2026, the same venue will host the opening ceremony of the 46th Chess Olympiad.

Frequently asked questions

Who won the 2023 World Rapid Championship in Samarkand?

Magnus Carlsen won the Open Rapid with 10 out of 13 points, his fifth World Rapid title. Russian International Master Anastasia Bodnaruk won the Women's Rapid by defeating Humpy Koneru in a playoff. Carlsen finished undefeated; Bodnaruk became the first IM in history to win the women's title.

Who won the 2023 World Blitz Championship in Samarkand?

Magnus Carlsen won the Open Blitz with 16 out of 21 points — his seventh World Blitz title and seventeenth world chess championship of any kind. Valentina Gunina of Russia won the Women's Blitz with 14 out of 17 points, her second title in this event (her first was in 2012).

Where exactly was the 2023 World Rapid and Blitz held?

At the Samarkand Congress Center, part of the Silk Road Samarkand tourism complex on the eastern edge of the city. The same complex will host the 46th Chess Olympiad in September 2026. The Congress Center has a total area of over 28,000 square metres and capacity for more than 1,000 participants and spectators.

Why did Hikaru Nakamura not play in Samarkand 2023?

The specific reasons for Nakamura's absence were not made public in detail. ChessBase noted his absence alongside that of the reigning world champion Ding Liren. Nakamura participated in the 2024 World Rapid and Blitz in New York the following year. The 2023 Samarkand championships are not a regular fixture for every top player in every cycle.

How much prize money was at stake?

The total prize fund was one million US dollars: $700,000 for the Open tournaments and $300,000 for the Women's tournaments. The Open Rapid winner received $60,000; the Open Blitz winner received $90,000. The Women's Rapid winner received $40,000.

What was the connection between 2023 and the 2026 Chess Olympiad?

FIDE had awarded Uzbekistan the right to host the 2026 Olympiad at the General Assembly in Chennai in August 2022 — over a year before the World Rapid and Blitz Championships came to Samarkand. The 2023 championships were not formally described as preparation, but they used the same venue, the same operational team, and faced many of the same logistical challenges that the Olympiad would face. The successful delivery of the 2023 championships was an important practical demonstration that the Silk Road Samarkand complex could host a large international chess event.

Did the Uzbek players win any medals in 2023?

No. Nodirbek Abdusattorov and Javokhir Sindarov, the two strongest Uzbek players, did not reach the medal positions in either the Rapid or the Blitz. Abdusattorov, the 2021 World Rapid Champion, drew with Carlsen in a closely watched round-12 game during the Rapid; both players accepted a quick draw in the Spanish Opening with Carlsen holding the lead.

What time controls were used?

Rapid: 15 minutes plus a 10-second increment per move, Swiss system, 13 rounds for the Open and 11 rounds for the Women's section. Blitz: 3 minutes plus a 2-second increment per move, Swiss system, 21 rounds for the Open and 17 rounds for the Women's section.

Sources and further reading

This article draws on:

• FIDE official championship website (worldrapidandblitz2023.fide.com) for full standings, time controls, schedules, and ceremony details
• FIDE news releases of December 2023 covering each round
• chess.com round-by-round coverage of the 2023 FIDE World Rapid Chess Championship and World Blitz Chess Championship
• ChessBase day-by-day reports by Carlos Alberto Colodro
• The Week in Chess archive of the 2023 World Rapid and Blitz Championships
• US Chess coverage of the Open Rapid final day
• ChessBase India report on the women's tournament playoff
• Russian Chess Federation press release of 30 December 2023
• Silk Road Samarkand official venue information
• chess.com news report on FIDE's late venue announcement

For readers interested in the deeper history of the Chess Olympiad — every edition from London 1927 to Budapest 2024 — the Great Book of Chess Olympiads series by Krzysztof Puszczewicz remains the most comprehensive English-language chronicle of the event. The 2023 World Rapid and Blitz Championships are not part of that series, since they were not an Olympiad. The next volume in the series will document Samarkand 2026.

Chess on the Silk Road returns to Samarkand from 15 to 28 September 2026. We will be covering it from the first round onward.