GM Ian Nepomniachtchi at one point led by 10 points before finishing with a 17.5-10.5 score against GM Anish Giri to cruise into the Speed Chess Championship 2025 Quarterfinals. Nepomniachtchi called it, “some really good training in the Catalan with one of the best players of the Catalan in the world” after Giri persisted in playing that opening 13 times with the white pieces. Nepomniachtchi will now face GM Alireza Firouzja, with a place in the in-person Semifinals in London at stake. Â
The final Round of 16 match, GM Fabiano Caruana vs. GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, will be on Thursday, October 30 at 10 a.m. ET / 15:00 CET / 7:30 p.m. IST.Â
2025 Speed Chess Championship Bracket
We now know seven of the eight 2025 Speed Chess Championship quarterfinalists.
Nepomniachtchi 17.5-10.5 Giri
The pre-match prediction for this match surprised our commentary team of GMs Aman Hambleton and Eric Hansen, who felt the clash between two players who had never met in Speed Chess was a coin-flip. Instead the stats predicted a 14-10 win for Nepomniachtchi.Â
Just as two days earlier in GM Hans Niemann vs. GM Ding Liren, however, the prediction fell short of just how dominant the winner would be. Nepomniachtchi crushed the five-minute section, won comfortably in three-minute, and then had a 16-6 lead in the one-minute section before Giri finally notched up some consolation wins. Â
5+1: Nepomniachtchi 6.5-1.5 Giri
When Nepomniachtchi was asked if he’d expected to win so comfortably he responded, “Absolutely not!” before adding: “Especially early in the match it could go a little bit differently, because at some point I got lucky, saving something lost, and winning something I wouldn’t be necessarily winning, but such is blitz!”
Especially early in the match it could go a little bit differently.
—Ian Nepomniachtchi
If there was a warning sign for Giri’s fans in the first game it was his sometimes shaky handling of the clock—a couple of moves played with under a second to spare—but otherwise the 110-move draw a pawn down showed admirable blitz skills.
Then in the second game he played the Catalan, won a pawn, and looked sure to take the lead. Multiple relatively easy wins were missed, however, until 66.Kb4? finally let the win slip away for good after Nepomniachtchi pounced.
Ian Nepomniachtchi pulls off a miracle escape in a position Eric Hansen said Anish Giri would expect to win 10 times out of 10! https://t.co/5WXOnzzKNS pic.twitter.com/p60Iolc7pV
— chess24 (@chess24com) October 29, 2025
“After the first two games I decided to play more solid,” said Nepomniachtchi, who switched to the Ruy Lopez with White and would stick to it until the match was over as a contest. He punished Giri immediately for the miss with a win, that wasn’t flawless but established the pattern of the match—Nepomniachtchi’s speed gave him such an edge on the clock that Giri was unable to exploit the occasional chances that came his way.
48…Nb4? was Giri’s last mistake, allowing 49.a7!.
That was the start of a steep slide for Giri, who lost on time in the next two games, then got ground down in 104 moves in the next game after playing a bold exchange sac. A fifth loss in a row would follow when the Dutchman ran into a painful fork.
5 wins in a row now for Nepomniachtchi, as Giri blunders a fork! https://t.co/Y8Gkva7zst pic.twitter.com/oQwcjdZnE3
— chess24 (@chess24com) October 29, 2025
A quiet Catalan draw ended the five-minute section with Giri trailing by five points.Â
3+1: Nepomniachtchi 6-4 Giri
Giri needed to do something fast, and he did, winning the first three-minute game to reduce the gap to four points. Nepomniachtchi was “punished,” just as Giri had been earlier, for playing an attractive exchange sac.
There were some classic Nepomniachtchi facial reactions to the loss!
Anish Giri starts the 3-minute section with his 1st win of the match! https://t.co/t7THSc4X2j#SpeedChess pic.twitter.com/qUP6QdMgsk
— chess24 (@chess24com) October 29, 2025
The pattern of the match wasn’t altered, however, since Nepomniachtchi struck back right away in the next game, using a big edge on the clock to correctly calculate the win when things got critical.
The lead was again five points, and now six of the next seven games were drawn, with Nepomniachtchi winning the other. The two-time world championship challenger was somewhat puzzled:
And then suddenly when the score was quite satisfying for me, +5, +6, Anish started making all these draws, which was a bit shocking, but I was obviously up for such an activity! I would surely repeat the moves every time I could.
Nepomniachtchi particularly noted the Catalan, which Giri played in every game with White except the last. He valued the practice:
It was a bit too dry and drawish, but normally you would specially spend several hours for playing such positions with a player of such caliber, but during the training session. Here it went for me as gratis, and eventually I was earning some money with every next draw—it was a win-win situation!
Here it went for me as gratis, and eventually I was earning some money with every next draw—it was a win-win situation!
—Ian Nepomniachtchi on his Catalan “training session” vs. Anish Giri
The commentators felt the strategy of playing solidly might at least give Giri some chances to hit back in bullet chess, but an endgame loss in a drawish position in the final three-minute game made the gap a gaping seven points.
1+1: Nepomniachtchi 5-5 Giri
Things wouldn’t improve in bullet, since in the very first game a position that was in fact close to winning for Giri saw him get checkmated three moves later.
Nepomniachtchi won the next two games as well, playing the Center Game (1.e4 e5 2.d4!?) in the second, to open up an unassailable 10-point lead.
After a draw in the next game he decided it was time for the King’s Gambit, an opening he authored a course on for Chessable. It didn’t exactly go smoothly, since Nepomniachtchi confessed, “I was too ashamed, because at some point I just forgot d4 is hanging, so I just blundered it!” but he was still winning near the end until Giri took over to grab a win.
That would be the start of a mini-recovery.
Giri defeats Nepomniachtchi’s King’s Gambit to score only his 2nd win of the match! https://t.co/gUr5Q2355O pic.twitter.com/rNlYQnsVRp
— chess24 (@chess24com) October 29, 2025
Giri then finally picked up a win in the Catalan, in just 23 moves, as the score, at least in the bullet, began to level out.
After one more draw, the next two games were a comedy of errors. First Nepomniachtchi left a knight en prise, then Giri made a Botez Gambit of his queen. The final game, at a glance, looked like another case of a blundered piece, but in fact Nepomniachtchi was giving up a knight for a seemingly brilliant attack. There was a neat refutation, however, with the commentators calling 27.Nh1!—putting a knight on its worst possible square—the move of the day.
So it was a nice finish for Giri, but the match had long been over, with Nepomniachtchi explaining, “I was mostly checking the match clock instead of the board” about the final stages.
Nepomniachtchi will now play Firouzja in the Quarterfinals, a match-up he described as “very challenging,” though he noted: “It could be bad in bullet for me, but not too bad, I would say, because it’s always +1 [i.e. there’s an increment after each move], and I think we have a roughly even score on Chess.com in our friendly games, and so on.” Â
There’s one more match remaining in the Round of 16, with Caruana taking on Praggnanandhaa this Thursday, and it’ll decide who faces GM Magnus Carlsen in the Quarterfinals.Â
The Speed Chess Championship, which starts on October 12 and culminates with Live Finals on February 8, 2026 in London, is Chess.com’s most important speed chess event. Some of the biggest names in chess compete to determine the best speed chess player in the world. The games are played with time controls of 5+1, 3+1, and 1+1. The prize fund is $250,000.Â
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