For the list of engines and downloadable files, see CCRL - Games (computerchess.org.uk/ccrl).
The next post will record the result of the Weissenhaus leg of the FCGST ['Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour'], which finished yesterday.
The tournament started with a two-day 10-player round robin that determined the pecking order for the six-day knockout event.
Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour (wikipedia.org)
There were two commenting streams, the 'Pro stream' and the 'Community stream'. Here are links to the 'Community stream' for each of the eight days.
The description of the first video in the list ('Day 1 Rapid RR') informed,
Freestyle Grand Slam Weissenhaus is the first leg of the 2025 Freestyle Chess Grand Slam tour and is a rapid round-robin and a classical knockout tournament.
Featuring some of the world's most legendary players: Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Gukesh Dommaraju, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Alireza Firouzja, Levon Aronian, Vincent Keymer, and Javokhir Sindarov.
A half-hour into the clip we see the method of choosing the start position.
'Bingo Balls'
'Rapid RR Day 1'
The start times in the clip for selecting the start position of each round are:-
(0:34:40) Rd 1
(1:34:40) Rd 2 - At first, the balls don't release.
(2:33:40) Rd 3
(3:34:40) Rd 4
(4:36:00) Rd 5
At some point we learn, 'Position doesn't go back in the bucket', meaning a position won't be repeated in a subsequent round. For last year's post on the event that kicked off the freestyle brand, see Carlsen Wins First Major Chess960 Event of 2024 (February 2024; esp. 'Nine Things We Learned - Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T. Challenge 2024'). Congratulations to the 2025 winner Vincent Keymer for what must be one of the most important tournament victories of his career.
First let's have some consequent off-board news that has been lingering since late last year: Wikipedia changed the name of its main Chess960/FRC page from 'Fischer Random Chess' to 'Chess960'; see Talk:Chess960 - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org; 'Requested move 29 October 2024'), for the not-so-consequent discussion. I made a similar choice when I first started to investigate Fischer's idea, a choice that was reinforced a few years later:-
Unlike Wikipedia, I don't have the time to return to the decision every five years. Let's get back to FCGST, which has jumped across all three of my chess blogs. After 'Freestyle Fight' on this blog, the latest chess960 alias popped up on my main blog in World Championship Yahoos 2025 ('1/?'; January 2025). To summarize:-
Those 104 stories were supplemented by two additional pages: 'Magnus Carlsen on Freestyle chess controversy' with 25 stories [...] I'm covering the freestyle saga on my chess960 blog, because 'freestyle' is one of numerous aliases for chess960. [...] The dispute is about FIDE's claim to have the exclusive right to any 'World Chess Championship'.
Any reference to 'World Chess Championship' is automatically a candidate for discussion on my blog of the same name. So far there have been two posts:-
End of story? Maybe, maybe not. Here are the Chess.com reports providing background and comments to all of the above. All reports were signed 'TarjeiJS', i.e. Tarjei J. Svensen, Norwegian journalist and ally of GM Carlsen.
It's clear that Carlsen has an axe to grind with FIDE and has convinced a wealthy backer to support his cause. History tells us that in any dispute between a top player and FIDE, the court of public opinion favors the player. History also tells us that FIDE wins the off-court struggle.
That's enough of the politics. The next post will record the result of the Weissenhaus leg of the FCGST, which finished yesterday.
Since then, much has happened. News of the tour has so far been published by both Chess.com and Chessbase.com. I'll concentrate on reports from Chess.com, because of the many comments by Chess.com members. The month started on a high note.
2024-12-20: Chess.com Officially Partners With Freestyle Chess To Support 2025 Grand Slam Tour (chess.com)
The lineup for the first event [Weissenhaus, Germany, on February 7-14] includes GMs Carlsen, Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Levon Aronian, Alireza Firouzja, Vincent Keymer, and Viswanathan Anand. They will be joined by the newly-crowned 18th World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju. The 10th and final spot will go to the winner of the online Freestyle Chess Play-In Weissenhaus taking place on Chess.com between January 4 and 8.
Each Freestyle Chess Play-In will consist of open qualifiers for untitled players, followed by a Swiss and a knockout, all in rapid time controls. Titled players can join the qualifier on the Swiss stage, with the knockout winner earning a spot in the upcoming Grand Slam event.
2025-01-09: Fedoseev Joins Carlsen & Co. In Weissenhaus After Winning Armageddon Thriller (chess.com; Colin_McGourty)
GM Vladimir Fedoseev beat GM Ian Nepomniachtchi in the Semifinals and then GM Javokhir Sindarov in a thrilling Final to clinch the last spot in next month's $750,000 2025 Weissenhaus Freestyle Chess Grand Slam.
A few weeks later, the story became ugly.
2025-01-21: FIDE Statement regarding the "Freestyle Chess" project (fide.com)
With regard to the recent communications from the "Freestyle Chess Players Club" ("FCPC"), FIDE states the following...
2025-01-22: FIDE Slams Freestyle Chess For Creating 'Unavoidable Divisions,' Threatens Legal Action (chess.com; TarjeiJS)
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) has criticized Freestyle Chess for branding its upcoming Grand Slam tour as a "World Championship," claiming the move threatens to divide the chess community and warning of potential legal action.
To veteran World Championship watchers (like me), this dispute is reminiscent of a split in world chess that started in 1993. For details, see my page, FIDE/PCA Chronology. In the saga that stretched more than a decade, finally resolved by the 2006 Kramnik - Topalov : Unification Match, there were no winners.
[Insert nitpicking here:] Why write 'Chess960' with an upper case 'C'? No one does that for 'chess', which is much better known. On top of that, as I never get tired of saying, chess960 isn't a variant of chess; it's an evolution. The traditional start position (SP518 RNBQKBNR) is chess960 limited to a single position of the 960 available. It took a larger-than-life Bobby Fischer to figure that out.
The Chess.com article included an overview of the tour's dates and venues, reproduced below. I suppose that 'NY, USA' means 'NYC', but maybe it means Albany, the capital of the state (or maybe Buffalo or Schenectady). We should know for certain in a few months.
A year ago, in Sayonara? (December 2023), I wrote,
I'm going back into hibernation, although I won't rule out an occasional post if I have something to say about a subject. Bye for now!
As it turns out, I managed 12 posts this past year, an average of one per month. What will 2025 bring? Maybe more of the same, maybe less. Who knows? If nothing else, I'll be back in a year to survey the scene.
As for the second part of the 'Multi-Millionaires' post, which promised a Saint Louis Chess Club 9LX event, it ended too late for this current post. More news next month...
GM Caruana won the event, 0.5 points ahead of GM Nakamura, who was 1.5 points ahead of the rest of the field. The full crosstable is shown below.
2024 Champions Showdown: Chess 9LX
(uschesschamps.com)
For a report on the last day of the three-day event, see Fabiano Caruana wins Chess 9LX Showdown in Saint Louis (chessbase.com; Carlos Alberto Colodro). At the end of that report, tags ('Topics') lead to reports on the previous rounds and links lead to final round reports for the same event in previous years.
For last year's final post on the 2023 event, see 2023 Champions Showdown, Videos (September 2023). For the Saint Louis Chess Club's video playlist for the 2024 event, see 2024 Chess 9LX (youtube.com).
The first dates for the new Freestyle Chess Grand Slam 2025 with Magnus Carlsen have been set: The elite of chess will initially meet from 7 to 14 February in Weissenhaus in northern Germany. The second event is planned for 17 to 24 July in the USA. In December 2025, the event will then move to South Africa, where it will be played from 1 to 8 December. The specific venues will be announced later.
Later the press release noted,
Thomas Harsch, who was appointed Managing Director of Freestyle Chess Operations GmbH on 1 September, added: "The opening tournament this February in Weissenhaus, Germany, has already received an overwhelmingly positive response from players, fans and the media around the world. Chess interest in the USA is traditionally very good, and in Africa, there is huge untapped potential that we now want to realize."
Harsch's LinkedIn page tells us,
Chief Operating Officer
Freestyle Chess : Full-time
Aug 2024 to Present : 4 mos
Berlin, Germany
Freestyle Chess is a sports and media company with the goal of bringing chess into the mainstream through more thrilling gameplay, avant-garde storytelling and world-class production quality. Freestyle Chess organizes a global tournament series across all continents where the world's top 25 players compete for the title of the best player in the world and prize money between $750k and $1m per tournament. Freestyle Chess is co-founded by Magnus Carlsen and Jan Henric Buettner and is backed by Left Lane Capital.
The same LinkedIn page points to a German language article from late July, Schach Turnierserie mit Magnus Carlsen: Finanzinvestor steckt 12 Millionen Dollar ins Profischach (manager-magazin.de). Google translates the title to 'Chess tournament series with Magnus Carlsen: Financial investor invests $12 million in professional chess', then continues,
Chess icon Magnus Carlsen and German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner want to popularize the special Fischer Random Chess with a worldwide tournament series. The financial investor Left Lane Capital believes in it – and is generously financing it.
That's all very good news indeed. As for the second part of the 'Multi-Millionaires' post, which promised a Saint Louis Chess Club 9LX event, it ended too late for this current post. More news next month...
