Magnus Carlsen’s chess revolution: Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour to start in India this year

After the success of the inaugural edition of Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T. Challenge, former world champion Magnus Carlsen has decided to expand the unique chess event into a ‘tour format’ with India being chosen as the first port of call for the event.

The tour — called the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour — is slated to start in India in November, with a whopping $500,000 (approximately Rs 4 crore) on offer as prize money for the Indian leg of the tour. The idea is to have a series of five tournaments per year, ideally on five different continents.

In a press release issued on Friday, Carlsen and his partner, German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner, said that after the first leg in India, the next stop of the tour will take players to Germany’s Weissenhaus from February 7-14, 2025. The organisers had plans to host the remaining events in New York, Cartagena (Colombia), and Cape Town besides Australia in 2026.

Carlsen, a five-time classical chess world champion, had claimed the title in the inaugural edition of the Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T. Challenge, which was held at a luxurious nature retreat in northern Germany last month.

“This tournament has been a dream come true for me,” Carlsen had said after winning the inaugural event. “I would have said that regardless of how the tournament had gone, but I felt that this whole tournament was a joy to play and I think all the players really, really enjoyed this format and will be happy to be back. So, just a joy to start from start to finish and I can’t wait for the next one.”

Ding Liren after winning the FIDE World Chess Championship (LEFT); Magnus Carlsen at the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz 2022 in Almaty. (PHOTOS: FIDE via Anna Shtourman and Lennart Ootes)

What was interesting about the event was that Carlsen got to handpick his seven challengers: reigning world champion Ding Liren, Fabiano Caruana, Levon Aronian, Alireza Firouzja, Vincent Keymer, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, and Gukesh Dommaraju.

Gukesh, India’s only contender at the event, had ended sixth.

“My personal goal for the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam is nothing short of making it as commercially successful as iconic sports events like the ATP for tennis, PGA for golf, and Formula 1 for motorsport. Central to our approach is placing the players at the forefront of our endeavours,” Buettner was quoted as saying in the release.

The organisers also said that they had invited the world’s top chess players to become members of their newly formed, exclusive Freestyle Chess Players Club (FCPC).

Magnus Carlsen’s entrepreneurial interests

After his success on the chessboard, Carlsen has made multiple forays into entrepreneurship.

Just last year, Carlsen joined hands with Norway Chess and a Norwegian company called Iterate to develop a new fantasy chess app. The app would give chess enthusiasts worldwide the chance to organise fantasy leagues and compete against one another based on games played in real-world tournaments around the year. Carlsen was said to be ‘personally involved’ in the building of the app, working alongside the teams at Norway Chess and Iterate to ‘design the gameplay for the app’.

The Norwegian chess star had also co-founded the Play Magnus Group, a company which promoted chess as a tool for intellectual growth. Play Magnus was acquired by Chess.com, the world’s largest chess website, in 2022.

What is freestyle chess?

Freestyle chess is a concept that was first popularised by the legendary Bobby Fischer in June 1996 in Buenos Aires.

The freestyle chess event gives a twist to traditional chess in the sense that the placement of the pieces on the board at the start of the game is different. While all the eight pawns of each colour remain in the second and the seventh ranks on the board like in regular chess, the position of the rest of the pieces — the rooks, the bishops, the knights, the queen and the king — on the first and the last rank changes randomly at the start of the game. It must be noted that the pieces still retain their regular characteristics in action.

Freestyle chess goes by multiple names: Fischer Random Chess, Chess 9LX and Chess 960 (960 is the number of possible starting positions on the board when you shuffle your pieces on the last ranks of the board).

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