The semi-finals and final were played over the board between October 27 to November 2, 2019, in the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Bærum, Norway.

The winner of the final was Wesley So, defeating Magnus Carlsen 13.5–2.5, to become the first FIDE world champion in Fischer random chess.

[2] The championship included several rounds with different time controls, organizational forms and access requirements.

Each of 32 groups played a Swiss-system tournament with 9 rounds and a time control of 10 minutes for the entire game plus an increment of 2 seconds per move.

In each round of the tournament, the two players played a "minimatch" consisting of two games with opposite color assignments.

Nevertheless, some prominent players were knocked out, including Jan-Krzysztof Duda, Sergey Karjakin, Alexander Grischuk and Leinier Domínguez.

The following 6 players qualified for the quarterfinals: Two more players were seeded directly into the quarterfinals: The runner-up in the World Chess Championship 2018 in standard chess, Fabiano Caruana, and the runner-up in the unofficial Fischer Random world championship match 2018, Hikaru Nakamura.

Carlsen won the semifinal match against Caruana by reaching a score of 12½-7½ in the last fast rapid game.

Leonard Barden observed that the score unadjusted for time controls would be 5-1 and compared this "crushing" defeat to Bobby Fischer's double 6-0 victories in the 1971 Candidates.