3912A (right): White mates in five moves (by Fritz Giegold, Die Welt 1978), Just a single line of play with all all Black’s replies forced, but it defeats most solvers. Photograph: The Guardian
Freestyle Chess, which made an impressive debut last month, has firmed up its plans to expand into five continents next year, as well as enlisting the top 25 elite grandmasters into a new club for its competing players. The variant, also known as Fischer Random and Chess 960, has the back rank pieces on both sides on random squares, with Black’s pieces placed equal-and-opposite to their White counterparts.
German promoter Jan Buettner, who heads Freestyle along with the world No 1, Magnus Carlsen, and who made his fortune from AOL Europe, has launched the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, where the prize fund for each of the five events is projected to rise gradually to $1m.
For comparison, the existing over-the-board Grand Chess Tour, organised from St Louis and culminating in the Sinquefield Cup, offers a total of $1.5m, while the Champions Tour, where four online tournaments are followed by an over-the-board final, has $1.7m.
Top grandmasters are enthusiastic, and no wonder. Freestyle offers a generously rewarded escape from the many hours of drudgery spent before a classical game in preparing openings in detail with the aid of a Stockfish computer, with the real possibility that the mutual research will fizzle out into a drawn ending. It is very different at the level of the average player or even the average master, where you can surprise the opponent with a well prepared opening bomb and where even this is no guarantee of ultimate success.
If Freestyle is to gain traction, Buettner will have to justify his declared ambition of “making it as commercially successful as iconic sports events like the ATP for tennis, PGA for golf, and Formula 1 for motorsport”. The next Slam in India in November, with a $500k prize fund, looks sure to be a success, as Indian chess fans will want to watch their teenage heroes take on Carlsen. February 2025, back in north Germany with $750k, should also go well, but the later events, where the Tour goes into new territory in South America and South Africa with the full $1m, may face logistical problems.
At best, if all goes according to plan, the global chess economy will receive a significant boost, while the benchmark for an elite grandmaster, currently 2700, will move up to 2725 to match the new pot of gold.
Matthew Wadsworth scored his best international performance yet on Thursday when the Cambridge economics graduate, 23, tied for second with 7/9 in the giant 400-player Reykjavik Open, taking sixth prize on tiebreak. The top seeded Romanian, Bogdan-Daniel Deac, won first prize with 7.5/9.
Wadsworth, who lost only once, played a fine attacking game in the ninth and final round to checkmate the No 4 seed, GM Jules Moussard of France, whose white king was caught in mid-board in a 41-move Italian Game.
Wadsworth’s rating performance narrowly missed achieving his second GM norm, but he will have another chance for that on Saturday, in one of two important tournaments that begin this weekend with opportunities for England’s young talents to win international titles. Both events have support from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s £500k grant for elite chess announced last year.
The 4NCL Spring GM Round Robin is a 10-player event where IMs Marcus Harvey, 28, Wadsworth, 23, and Shreyas Royal, 15, all have chances for the GM norm of 6.5/9. Play starts at 3pm on Saturday, with nine rounds in five days.
The eighth Menchik Memorial commemorates the first woman world champion, who was killed by a V1 rocket in 1944. The 10-player event starts on Friday (round one 10am, round two 3pm), and continues until Tuesday, with women’s title norms at stake.
Bodhana Sivanandan, nine, will take part and comes direct from another impressive result at Reykjavik, where she scored 5.5/9 with a TPR of 2069, losing only to a GM and an IM (see the puzzle below). Games from both next week’s events will be shown live on lichess
In the £400k American Cup, with Open and Women’s sections, Levon Aronian beat Wesley So in the open final, while Alice Lee, 14, defeated the holder, Irina Krush, in the women’s final. The favourite, the world No 2, Fabiano Caruana, lost to Aronian and So, sparking concerns about his form before next month’s Candidates in Toronto.
3912: 1...Re5! 2 Qxc3 Qxh2+! 3 Kxh2 Rh5+ 4 Kg1 Rh1 mate. If 2 g4 Qxg4+! 3 Nxg4 Re1 mate or 3 Kf1 Qh3+ and mates.
3912A: 1 Rc1! g4 2 Rc2! dxc2 3 Bc1! a3 4 Rf4! Kxf4 5 d4 mate.
3912B: 1 Nd5+! Qxd5/Kb5 2 Qa4 mate.
