World champion Magnus Carlsen has won three coveted chess titles, making him the World Champion in the classical or conventional format, as well as in the rapid and blitz formats. The difference separating the formats is the time factor. In classical chess, a player gets 90 minutes to make forty moves; in rapid chess, a player gets 25 minutes to complete his game, and for the blitz games, three minutes are allowed to conclude the game.
In his race for the rapid and blitz championships, Carlsen had to get past Hikaru Nakamura, the US and world rapid champion, and Le Quang Liem, the Vietnamese world blitz champion. Carlsen drew with Nakamura, a relatively unknown outcome in blitz games, and beat Le. Carlsen suffered a shock defeat at the hands of the Chinese phenomenon, Lu Shanglei, an unknown grandmaster. In the blitz championship, Anand drew with
