Magnus Carlsen to meet Ding Liren in a format called ‘Freestyle Chess’. What’s that?

World No 1 Magnus Carlsen will face off against world champion Ding Liren across the chess board in a new, innovative tournament starting from Friday. It will be the first time the duo will command their miniature armies of carved pieces against each other since the Chinese GM sat down on the throne abdicated by Carlsen without a shot being fired.

The duo will face off in a unique format with a twist — a format popularised by the American chess legend Bobby Fischer called freestyle chess. The format promotes creativity from players by having unique starting positions on the board rather than having pieces on the back ranks in the same positions.

Besides the reigning world champion Liren and the current world no 1, the invitational tournament — called the Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T. Challenge — will also have six other players: with veterans Fabiano Caruana and Levon Aronian joined by young stars like Alireza Firouzja, Vincent Keymer, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, and Gukesh Dommaraju, who will be India’s only representative.

What makes the tournament interesting is that Carlsen has handpicked the rest of the seven challengers, who will face off at an expansive nature retreat in northern Germany called Weissenhaus Private Nature Luxury Resort. The resort previously played host to the G7 Foreign Ministers Summit in 2022.

The tournament will start with a round-robin event in the rapid format (with a time control of 25 minutes on the clock with 10-second increments for every move) on Friday and Saturday. This will be followed by the knockout stages: where all eight players will play the quarters on Sunday and Monday, semis on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the final on (the time control for the final will be 90 minutes for the first 40 moves with 30 more added minutes and a 30-second increment per move after move 30).

While the winner of the event stands to take home $60,000 (approximately Rs 50 lakh), the player finishing last also bags a cheque for $8000 (approximately Rs 6.6 lakhs).

But what is freestyle chess?

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).

How this form of chess differs from the other forms is in the placement of the pieces on the board at the start of the game. 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: rooks travel in straight lines, bishops saunter diagonally, and so on.

The purpose of changing the position of the pieces in the far ends of the board is to throw the meticulous opening preparations that chess players do, running into several moves, out of the window. Players only find out what the board position is before the game, so as to remove the element of pre-planned sequence of moves.

While promoting the event, Carlsen had called it “the format I have been waiting for”. In a clip explaining his fascination with freestyle chess, the Norwegian said: “The positions are decided right before the game. So players have no time to prepare. There’s no theory. And really, that’s what excites me about this format. Every game is unique.”

It was Fischer who had introduced this variant of chess to the public in June 1996 in Buenos Aires. Since then, there have been world championships also held in Fischer Random chess.

Explaining his rationale behind pushing this format, Fischer had once said: “Creativity is maybe the No 3 aspect in chess now. First is pre-arrangement (of moves). Next is memorisation. Then comes creativity.”

BONUS: Can you think like a world champion?

Take a look at the position below from a famous game and predict the next move (Answer and interactive below).

Did you figure it out?

You can now retrace that whole game with the interactive below:

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