GMs Jose Martinez, Alireza Firouzja, and Alexey Sarana won the first three 3 0 Thursday events, which were held on November 13. It was the debut set of tournaments for the most popular time control on Chess.com for titled players. 3 0 Thursday fits in between Titled Tuesday and Freestyle Friday on Fridays in a schedule that speeds up as the week moves along.
The first-ever 3 0 Thursday tournament saw many of the top players in the world competing, including GMs Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura. Both of them played a role in the fight for first place. After a poor start, dropping a game to IM Yoseph Theolifus Taher, Nakamura stormed back and took down Martinez in a long game in round nine.
Martinez was still in good position with 7.5/9 and won his 10th game as well against Sarana. That set up a chance for Martinez to win the whole thing, with the white pieces against Carlsen.
The win gave Martinez a share of first and better tiebreaks than Nakamura. The American number-one wasn’t too unhappy with his result, though, as strong play in the event helped elevate his rating to a site record, 3346!
Hikaru Nakamura’s done it AGAIN!! 🤯
Hikaru just broke the all time Blitz rating record on https://t.co/EufIHvcIFK with a staggering 3438! Congratulations! pic.twitter.com/FI9bpCPuyn
— Chess.com (@chesscom) November 13, 2025
The second event GM Vladimir Fedoseev started well, winning his first six games. He was finally stopped by GM Haik Martirosyan, who induced a blunder in a difficult endgame.
That left an opening GMs Firouzja and Hans Niemann, two veterans of all the top speed-chess events. In round nine, Firouzja and Niemann defeated Fedoseev and Martirosyan respectively and they both won in round 10 as well. That set up a first-place matchup where Firouzja needed to hold a draw as Black to win the event, while a win for Niemann would give him sole first place. In a complicated game, Firouzja took over and drew from a position of strength.
In the final event of the day, Sarana demonstrated his skill in shorter blitz games. In his key games with second and third place finishers, GMs Alexander Grischuk and Benjamin Bok, Sarana barely held his difficult positions on the board and then used time to his advantage to win both games. The round-eight game with Grischuk was particularly dramatic.
In the very next round Sarana performed a similar escape against Bok.
3 0 Thursday features three tournaments every week for titled players. The events are on Thursday every week at 11 a.m., 4 p.m., and 9 p.m. ET / 17:00, 22:00, and 3 a.m. (+1) CET / 9:30 p.m., 2 a.m. (+1), and 5 a.m. (+1) IST.
