Richard Rapport has played thousands of high-level games, but a handful of results capture exactly who he is at the board: a creative original who wins by dragging opponents into positions no textbook prepared them for. We’re keeping this in prose and pointing you to reliable databases for the full move-by-move, so nothing here is a made-up score.
Beating the World Champion with a weird setup (Tata Steel 2017)
The headline result of Rapport’s career — the one every fan brings up — is his win over Magnus Carlsen. In round eight of the 2017 Tata Steel tournament in Wijk aan Zee (played on 22 January 2017), Rapport had White against the reigning World Champion, and he did it his way: instead of a mainstream theoretical battle, he built a hypermodern, double-fianchetto Réti-style setup, quietly developing his bishops onto the long diagonals and steering the game into fresh, unfamiliar territory.
It worked. Carlsen, denied the sharp theoretical fight he might have prepared for, drifted into an inferior position, and Rapport found a clean, beautiful finish to bring home the full point. It was Rapport’s first-ever game against the World Champion, and he made it count — a perfect snapshot of his whole philosophy: take the world’s best out of their comfort zone, then out-think them in the resulting mess. You can replay the full game on Chess.com and other databases to see how the double-fianchetto pressure built.
The Danzhou breakthrough (2020)
Beating a world champion in one game is one thing; winning a whole elite tournament is another. In 2020, Rapport won the 11th Danzhou tournament in China — and did it undefeated, a mark of maturity and control from a player once known mainly for his fireworks. A clean, loss-free run through a strong field is exactly the kind of result that signals a player is ready to challenge at the very top, and it came right before his best years.
The Candidates run (2022): earning the biggest stage
Rapport’s greatest achievement isn’t a single game — it’s how he got to the biggest stage in chess. Across the 2022 FIDE Grand Prix series, he fought through two legs of elite round-robin-plus-knockout play, reaching the semi-finals in the first leg and then winning the second leg in Belgrade. That result qualified him for the 2022 Candidates Tournament — the eight-player event that decides who challenges for the World Championship. Simply being there put him among the eight best-placed players in the world’s title cycle.
The Candidates itself was a hard tournament for him — he finished last, scoring 5½/14 in a brutally strong field. We’re including that honestly, because it’s part of the story: reaching the Candidates is a career-defining accomplishment, and even a difficult result there means you were fighting the very best players alive, round after round, on the sport’s most pressure-soaked stage. Rapport earned his seat at that table the hard way.
Behind the scenes: helping crown a World Champion (2023)
Here’s a “best game” that never had Rapport’s name on the scoresheet at all. When Ding Liren played (and won) the 2023 World Chess Championship, Rapport was part of his team as one of his seconds — the trusted grandmasters who work in secret to prepare openings and analyze positions for a title challenger. Championship preparation is some of the deepest, most creative chess work in the sport, and it’s telling that a player as original as Rapport was brought in to help. His fingerprints, in the form of ideas and preparation, are part of a World Championship-winning effort. Meet the champion he helped in Ding Liren.
Why his games are worth studying
Even if you’re nowhere near grandmaster level, Rapport’s games are some of the most fun and instructive material out there — for a few concrete reasons:
- You don’t need theory to win. His Carlsen game is proof that reaching a fresh, unmemorized position and simply out-playing your opponent is a completely valid way to win — even against the best.
- Creativity is a weapon, not a gimmick. Rapport’s offbeat openings aren’t jokes; they’re serious attempts to reach positions he understands better than his opponent. That’s a mindset worth copying.
- Fighting spirit. From beating world champions to slugging it out at the Candidates, Rapport plays to win, with both colors. He rarely takes the easy draw.
- Maturity is a superpower. His undefeated Danzhou win shows how a naturally aggressive player learned control — a great lesson for anyone whose attacks sometimes backfire.
How to find and replay his games
Because we keep this page in prose rather than printing move lists we can’t fully verify, here’s the honest, practical way to study Rapport’s chess for yourself. His full game archive lives on Chess.com and other public databases, where you can replay every move with an engine running alongside. A few searches worth trying: his 1.b3 and Trompowsky wins as White (to see how his offbeat openings actually play out), his King’s Indian games as Black (his combative defensive weapon), and of course the 2017 Tata Steel win over Carlsen to watch the double-fianchetto squeeze up close. Watching a creative player with the engine on is one of the best ways to learn — you get to see which of his wild-looking ideas the computer approves of, and which ones were pure human daring that somehow worked anyway.
Keep exploring
Want to see how the pieces of his game fit together? Read about his playing style, tour his opening repertoire, trace his rating history, or head back to the full Rapport profile.
Written and fact-checked by the Chess Lab Academy Editorial Team · Facts verified against Wikipedia, the Chess.com report on Rapport’s win over Carlsen, and Chess.com, as of July 2026 · Game moves should be replayed from those databases · Last verified 2026-07-10 · How we verify content.