Batsiashvili beats Kosteniuk to win European Women’s Rapid title

A repeat of the blitz finale

The 2025 edition of the European Women’s Rapid Championship was held over the weekend in Monte-Carlo. As has become customary in recent years, the tournament was organised by the European Chess Union at the beginning of the calendar year following the nominal edition.

The championship was played according to the Swiss system over 11 rounds, with five rounds scheduled for Saturday and the remaining six rounds played on Sunday. The time control was 15 minutes per game plus 10 seconds per move from the first move. A total of 143 players from 30 different countries registered to take part.

The top seeds were Alexandra Kosteniuk of Switzerland, Nino Batsiashvili of Georgia and Antoaneta Stefanova of Bulgaria. Eline Roebers, who came from winning the European Women’s Blitz Championship on Friday, started the rapid event as the seventh seed.

For a large part of the tournament, Kosteniuk appeared well-placed to justify her status as the highest-rated player in the field. She featured consistently among the leaders, either sharing the top spot or holding it outright across several rounds. On the second day of play, she made a particularly strong start, scoring three consecutive victories to move clear at the top of the standings with 7½ points out of 8 with three rounds to go.

Alexandra Kosteniuk and Antoaneta Stefanova, two former women’s world champions, battling in Monte-Carlo | Photo: European Chess Union

At that stage, her closest challenger was Mai Narva, the twelfth seed, who followed with 7 points. Batsiashvili and Anastasia Avramidou of Greece were next in line on 6½ points. Kosteniuk then drew her round-nine game and followed up with a win in round ten, extending her lead to a full point going into the final round. By then, Batsiashvili had established herself as the sole player in second place.

As in the blitz tournament two days earlier, the decisive final round paired the two frontrunners against each other. Batsiashvili had the white pieces and knew that a win would be sufficient to secure the title, as the first tiebreak criterion was the result of the direct encounter between the tied players.

The final-round game developed into a strategic battle. A number of positional inaccuracies by Kosteniuk, including a middlegame decision to offer a queen trade, left her worse heading into the endgame. Despite being in a must-win situation, Batsiashvili correctly accepted the queen exchange, confident that the resulting position favoured her.

The Georgian player obtained a clearly better endgame and appeared on course to convert both the game and the tournament. However, a mistaken capture briefly offered Kosteniuk hopes of escaping with a draw. Those hopes proved short-lived, as Kosteniuk soon made another error, allowing Batsiashvili to decide the game immediately with a small tactical combination involving a knight fork.

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Batsiashvili and Kosteniuk both finished the tournament with 9 points, but Batsiashvili was awarded the title thanks to her victory in their direct encounter. She also completed the event as one of only two players to remain undefeated throughout the 11 rounds. Notably, the other undefeated participant was ten-year-old English prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan, who scored three wins and eight draws for a final score of 7/11. Entering the championship as the 70^th seed, Sivanandan finished in 20^th place.

Six players finished a full point behind the two leaders on 8/11. The bronze medal went to Sofio Gvetadze, the lowest-rated player among that group, who edged out Narva and Roebers on the Buchholz Cut-1 tiebreak criterion.

Final standings

In this video course, experts (Pelletier, Marin, Müller and Reeh) examine the games of Judit Polgar. Let them show you which openings Polgar chose to play, where her strength in middlegames were, or how she outplayed her opponents in the endgame.

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