While most of us were getting ready to celebrate New Year’s Eve, Team Liquid chess phenom Magnus Carlsen has continued to shatter records by winning not one but two more world championship titles at the prestigious Rapid & Blitz events in Doha. The two wins came in very different fashions: the first was imperious, the second, miraculous.

A decade of dominance

If you are a casual chess fan who only recently got interested in the royal game, you might not know just how long and how consistent Carlsen’s reign has been in the faster time formats. While the biggest and most prestigious title is the classical world title – something Carlsen is no stranger to, either – featuring a one-on-one match between the champion and the challenger, the rapid and blitz world championships are more recent additions to the chess calendar. They feature a large field of elite players (247 this time around), and winning requires you to top the points charts over all of them. “It's a very difficult tournament,” the Norwegian himself said.

So, how strong is Magnus Carlsen in these rapid and blitz events? He has finished in the top three at least in one of these events for every single year since 2014, with six rapid and nine blitz titles in total – and he did the double for the fifth time to close off 2025, winning both tournaments in spectacular fashion.

Here’s how he did it.

Ravaging the rapids

Carlsen swatted away the competition in the rapid edition of the tournament, where each player had 15 minutes plus 10 seconds per move to play out the thirteen games. Having started out with four wins a trot and then two valuable draws against elite opposition, the world number one’s only stumble came at the hands of Vladislav Artemiev in round seven.

The Norwegian bounced back from the stinging defeat in characteristic fashion, reeling off eight wins in a row (including a grudge match against Hans Niemann and a clash with young phenom Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus), a performance so strong he all but secured the tournament win with one round to spare; a monumental achievement in a field this strong and large.

Having a full-point lead over the chasing pack heading into the final game meant that Carlsen was always guaranteed a playoff spot in case of a tie (in a scenario where he’d lose his final game while one of the chasers won theirs), but he duly secured a draw against GM Anish Giri of the Netherlands to win by a full point, with his nine wins, three draws and one loss in total serving as his highest-ever score in this tournament format.

So, smooth sailing in the blitz event as well, right? Well, not so fast. Carlsen made sure to gift some drama to all Team Liquid fans as he closed out the chess year in style.

Battling back in the blitz

"As long as I'm not mathematically out, ruling me out is not a good idea" – Magnus Carlsen

Featuring 19 rounds of super-fast 3+2 chess (just three minutes plus two seconds per move for the entire game) followed by a top-four playoff, the World Blitz Chess Championship is one of the toughest events to win on the calendar.

And if we’re being honest, it didn’t seem likely at one point that Carlsen would be able to retain the title he split with Ian Nepomniachtchi last year in New York: there were some spectacular and uncharacteristic errors on the Norwegian’s part, ones that you and I could have also easily made at the chessboard, reminding everyone that at the end of the day, he is also only human.

Two seconds of increment for each move may seem like a decent amount of time for those who primarily play chess online, but it’s almost nothing when you play over the board and also have a clock to deal with. IRL mouseslips can also be quite devastating, as Carlsen found out when he dropped his queen trying to capture a pawn against Arjun Erigaisi and losing on time in the process.

Coupled with a shocking blunder against fellow Team Liquid representative Fabiano Caruana, where he blundered a rook in one move out of nowhere, and forfeiting against Haik Martirosyan after knocking over the pieces and running out of time, the comeback on day three seemed like an impossible task.

But Magnus Carlsen isn’t the chess GOAT for nothing – and unlike in the rapid event, where playoffs are only scheduled in case the leaders are tied, the blitz event features a playoff for the top four regardless of the points total. It was still a tough ask for the Norwegian to make it there from so far behind, but just like the rapid event, he locked in and rattled off four wins. And so it came to a four-match Team Liquid faceoff in the blitz playoff semifinals, where Carlsen and Caruana had to battle one another once more, knowing full well that they’d deny their teammate a medal in the end – and it was the world number one who made the cut, with two draws followed by two wins for a match score of 3-1. 

The Norwegian chess phenom ended up facing Nodirbek Abdusattorov in the grand final, who became the youngest-ever player in the rapid format back in 2021, defeating both Carlsen and Caruana along the way. The 21-year-old is #12 in the world in the classical rankings, too, so he was quite the gatekeeper for face at the final hurdle.

And once again, Carlsen made things difficult – or interesting – for himself with a loss in the first game, with the White pieces, no less, but he more than made up for it in the second, where he somehow squeezed a win out of one of the most dead-drawn positions your correspondent has ever seen played out among grandmasters. Just one knight and a set of symmetrical pawns? Turns out, there’s still a way to create threats here if you’re the chess GOAT.

Abdusattorov found an impressive drawing mechanism to take the sting out of Carlsen’s Jobava London in the third game, but despite stopping the world number one from getting anything out of his White games, he was ground down in a challenging endgame, where Carlsen employed a spectacular temporary bishop sacrifice to force a winning position on move 62.

And so his total count of chess world championships is up to 20. Not bad for five days of work to round out the year!

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