960 Fischer Random Tournament 2025
The Chess960 tournament is a 6 round Swiss, 15 mins + 5 secs, which will be held over two weeks on 10th and 17th of April.
Magnus Carlsen on why the future of chess lies in freestyle;
Time, at the sport’s highest levels, for less computer-assisted rote learning and more creativity
Illustration: Dan Williams
ON FEBRUARY 7th the inaugural tournament of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour will begin on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast. My anticipation is immense. At the Weissenhaus Resort, the world’s top players will come together, among them Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura and Dommaraju Gukesh, the newly crowned world chess champion, who is 18 years old. Yet the most compelling aspect of the grand slam isn’t the venue or even the participants. It’s the format. We will be playing Freestyle Chess, a variant I hold dear and view as the future of the sport.
Why freestyle? Following my fifth consecutive victory in the World Chess Championship in 2022, I announced that I would no longer defend the title. Many speculated that I was exhausted, or that I was scared of the next generation of players. On the contrary, my passion for chess remains as strong as ever, and I am as ambitious as I’ve always been. What changed was my perspective on the format of the classical world championship itself.
The challenge wasn’t the games, which often stretch for hours. I enjoy the length of time allowed under the rules. My title defence in 2018 against Fabiano Caruana, for instance, pushed us, over 12 drawn games, to our mental and physical limits, before I emerged victorious in the tiebreak. The issue lay elsewhere, in the months of grinding preparation leading up to the event. Modern World Chess Championships demand endless memorisation of computer-generated opening lines, reducing the sport’s artistry to rote learning. As someone who treasures the creativity of chess, I wanted to focus more on this aspect of the game. Also, life beyond chess deserved my attention too.
When Jan Henric Buettner, a German entrepreneur (who owns the Weissenhaus) and late-blooming chess enthusiast, approached me in 2023 with the idea of a Freestyle Chess series, I was instantly captivated. Freestyle Chess, also known as Fischer Random, radically reimagines the game by randomising the placement of back-rank pieces like the king, queen and bishops, leaving pawns untouched. This creates 960 possible starting positions for white and renders traditional opening preparation obsolete. (Though in our grand slam, the standard placement is banned, along with swapping king and queen.) The black pieces are mirrored, and the players must rely on intuition, creativity and raw mental acuity—qualities I believe embody the essence of chess.
The pilot event in February 2024 at Weissenhaus proved that Freestyle Chess isn’t just a novelty—it’s a revitalisation of the sport. The tournament combined innovative gameplay with a player-focused approach. For example, Fabiano and I came up with an idea for how, in a creative way, to use the 15 minutes between the announcement of the starting line-up and the start of the game. Originally, the plan had been for players to retreat to their individual boxes for quiet contemplation. But wouldn’t it be much more exciting if the players instead exchanged ideas in small groups, divided by black and white pieces? (The players with the black pieces form one group, while the players with white form the other.) We tried it, using corner sofas, and it proved really inspiring—fostering unique strategic insights. Also, fans were brought closer to the action through features including a “confession booth”, where, live, players shared thoughts and emotions. We even monitored heart rates, providing a novel layer of drama. At one critical moment Fabiano’s pulse spiked to 170 beats a minute, while I was pleased to remain comparatively calm under pressure.
The new series, with five “grand slam” tournaments and with ten or 12 participants a tournament, also addresses longstanding inequities in professional chess. Our prize pot is also higher than in classical chess and starts at $750,000 per tournament and rises to $1m—an overdue recognition of the costs that players at the top level incur. In addition, Freestyle Chess lowers barriers to entry for aspiring players, by diminishing a reliance on exhaustive, theoretical study and on access to high-performance computing. This opens opportunities for underrepresented regions that brim with untapped talent and enthusiasm. In the same way that young Brazilians kick around a football on dusty patches with dreams of going further, we are going to see young folk in Africa and elsewhere turning to chess in a much bigger way. Our event next December in South Africa will be a significant step towards globalising the sport.
As the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour begins, I look forward not only to competing but to witnessing how this format reshapes the future of chess. And, with luck, I’ll also find time for a round of golf among the rolling hills of eastern Holstein.■
From Wikipedia...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960