Latest news with #FischerRandom
Business Wire
3 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Freestyle Chess' Grand Slam Tour Will Make its U.S. Debut at Wynn Las Vegas
LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Freestyle Chess, the innovative chess league co-founded by Magnus Carlsen and Jan Henric Buettner that prioritizes creativity over memorization, will bring their Grand Slam Tour to the United States for the first time this July. The event, hosted at Wynn Las Vegas, will kick off with 'Chesstival' on July 13, featuring current and former NBA players in a knockout-style chess tournament. Thanks to a partnership with $50,000 in total prize money will be donated to the charity of the winners' choice. The Grand Slam Tournament will follow from July 16 through July 20. 'Wynn Las Vegas offers an unparalleled stage to introduce Freestyle's high-energy, immersive format to the U.S. – not just as a game of strategy, but as a world-class spectator experience,' said Jan Henric Buettner, CEO and co-founder of Freestyle Chess. For the first time, chess fans can experience Freestyle Chess live, as the 2025 Grand Slam Tournament opens ticket sales to the public. Hosted in Wynn's 50,000-square-foot Lafite Ballroom, the event will bring the tour's dynamic energy to life with immersive production, live commentary, and storytelling. Fans can choose from three ticket tiers: general admission, VIP, and private booths with player meet-and-greets – designed to offer a world-class experience. Tickets start at $90 and are available for purchase here. 'I really believe Chesstival is one of the biggest paradigm shifts, along with Freestyle Chess, that the chess world has ever seen, and I think they're going to help grow the game,' said former NBA MVP and investor in Freestyle Chess, Derrick Rose. The event follows Freestyle Chess raising $20 million in funding from venture capital firms such as Left Lane Capital, as well as athletes like Derrick Rose to support the expansion of its operations and global footprint. The league features top-ranked players such as five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen, reigning World Chess Champion Gukesh Dommaraju, and former World Rapid Champion Hikaru Nakamura. Each Grand Slam Tournament event offers $750,000 in prize money, setting a new benchmark for chess as a global sport. The championship at the end of the tour will crown the first Freestyle Chess Champion, marking a historic milestone in the evolution of the game. Following the rules of Chess960 (Fischer Random), which randomizes starting positions, Freestyle Chess emphasizes creativity and strategy, leveling the playing field for even the world's best players. For more information, please visit the Freestyle Chess website here. About Freestyle Chess Freestyle Chess was founded in 2024 by Magnus Carlsen and Jan Henric Buettner, to revolutionize the game of chess. Capitalizing on the boom of interest in the sport, Freestyle Chess incorporates a unique style of gameplay featuring Fischer Random and follows the players' heart rates throughout the matches. Working to democratize the sport, matches are available for free online, and players participate in press conferences and post-match interviews, keeping the company's events exciting for all audiences. This year, Freestyle Chess kicked off its Grand Slam tournaments in Germany, France with upcoming stops in the United States and South Africa.
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
Chess: Carlsen scores record nine out of nine at Grenke Freestyle Open
Magnus Carlsen, the world No 1, soared to a new landmark in chess history last weekend, when the 34-year-old won all his nine games in the Grenke Freestyle Open at Karlsruhe, Germany. It was a result comparable to the great historical performances. Bobby Fischer won the 1963-64 US Championship with an 11/11 'picket fence', then defeated both Mark Taimanov and Bent Larsen by 6-0 in the 1971 Candidates. Anatoly Karpov triumphed at Linares 1994 with a 11-2 total, while further back the yardstick performance was Alexander Alekhine's 14-1 at San Remo 1930. However, Fide does not officially rate Freestyle chess, in which the back rank pieces have randomised starting positions. It is also known as Fischer Random, Chess 960, and Chess 9LX. It was a remarkable victory in physical terms. Carlsen came direct to Grenke from his victory in the Paris leg of the Freestyle Grand Slam, and was fatigued by the two rounds a day schedule. His laconic post-victory comment was 'I'm not going to do that again, that's for sure!' He relied on grinding technique for many of his wins, but scored in a complex battle against the eight-time French champion Étienne Bacrot, who asked Carlsen for a selfie before the start. Carlsen's final round win against Vincent Keymer, the 20-year-old who has emerged as his main Freestyle rival, was also a tense struggle until the young German blundered in time pressure with an unsound knight sacrifice. Superior clock handling has been a key to Carlsen's success. He understands the sometimes chaotic Freestyle openings faster and deeper than his opponents. The Grenke event produced a world record entry of 3,000 players, 500 up on 2024 and double the highest US total of 1500 at the 1986 World Open in Philadelphia. A drone's eye view of the multiple playing halls shows the scale of the vast operation. Just a day after Grenke, Carlsen was in action again, winning the late version of online Titled Tuesday. However, the Norwegian was upstaged in the early version, where the 13-year-old Turkish prodigy, Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, became the youngest ever winner of this highly competitive event. neglected to mention Erdogmus in its headline, but the teenager's impressive result was underlined by his strong performance in the Grenke Freestyle Open, where Erdogmus drew with three 2700+ opponents and totalled 7/11. Next Monday is the eighth and final episode of BBC Two's Chess Masters: The Endgame, when the four finalists Richie, Kai, Thalia and Lula will decide the winner. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Episode seven proved a disappointment in audience numbers, supplied by Broadcast, which dropped to 535,000 and 4% of the total viewers. Perhaps it was an effect of the Easter holiday. The highlight was a three board simultaneous performance by the prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan (seen here in action at an earlier simul in Harrow), in which the opponent she checkmated the fastest was eliminated. If the semi-finals and final were a normal tournament with head to head pairings, Kai, who has an excellent record in Manchester weekend events, would be the favourite, but according to the BBC's advance clip the challenge will also involve solving tactical puzzles. It was different in BBC Two's The Master Game of the 1970s and 80s, when Karpov, the then world champion, was twice the top seed and the other grandmasters knew that to succeed they had to defeat the Russian … 3969: 1…Qh3+ 2 Ke1 (2 Kg1 Qg2 or Nf3 mate) Ng2+ 3 Ke1 Ne3++ 4 Kf1 Qf1+! 5 Rxf1 Ng2 mate.
Indian Express
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
What happened in Budapest when Susan Polgar helped Bobby Fischer finalise rules of a radical new format? Endgame was Freestyle Chess
Bobby Fischer and Susan Polgar, two of the most iconic figures of chess, might remember Budapest differently. But speaking about her just-released book, Rebel Queen, to the eldest Polgar genius recounted how Fischer brainstormed with her on his initial ideas on the revolutionary format, even as Freestyle Chess, known essentially as Fischer Random or Chess960 came into being. Susan Polgar's memoir delves into several topics, but hitherto little known was how she persuaded Fischer, back then in hiding from American agencies after the Boris Spassky rematch, to move to Budapest. Susan told 'That was quite fascinating that after his match, he was kind of in hiding in a little town just across the Hungarian-Yugoslav border. And to my biggest surprise, at one moment when I happened to be in Peru, as I later learned, one of our mutual friends reached out to my family to come to visit. And my parents and my sisters went to visit, and the meeting went well, but he was complaining about how I didn't join them.' When she got to know he was keen on meeting the pioneer, and she had returned in May 1993, Susan was thrilled that the legendary Bobby Fischer wanted to meet her. Though nobody knew where exactly he was in hiding, Susan would drive out to Yugoslavia, and the two chess whizzes would hit it off well. 'He was already fascinated by Fischer Random, and we played our very first game in Fischer Random there,' she told 'Seeing how he was living at the time in this small hotel room, I was just throwing up the idea that 'Why don't you move to Budapest, you know, you'd have a lot more things to do. Because we have plenty of nice restaurants, cinemas, spas, you know, I would be happy to help you around. Especially in the beginning, you may have other friends like Pal Benko or Lajos Portisch,' quoted Polgar as saying. She would narrate that he was intrigued byvthe idea, and asked her, 'Do you think I could?' 'And obviously implying that he was going against the U.S. government, and Interpol was perhaps looking for him.' The rematch with Spassky was not to the liking of the American establishment, though Spassky and Fischer loved dusting off their brains, and playing again. Polgar would test the waters at border control in a hilarious way. 'So when I was driving back from that first visit to Yugoslavia, meeting him, on the border, I asked the border control guy, 'What would happen if I had a gentleman by the name Robert James Fisher sitting with me in the car?' And he looked at me, not understanding the question, 'What would there be? Does he have a valid passport?' I said, 'Yes, he does.' 'Well, then what would be? He would go across the border with you. Nothing would happen,' she told She would send a message to the mutual friend, and Fischer would pack up and move to Budapest along with his bodyguard and Eugene Torre, who had been his companion for some time back in those days. 'And he stayed in Budapest for around eight years,' she recalled. In those early weeks and months, she saw him nearly every day, showed him around. She would recall to 'We had countless dinners. And along those ways, those dinners and conversations, we discussed in great detail and experimented with Fischer Random, which eventually turned out to be Chess960.' In those meetings, the freestyle format would be tweaked. 'I helped him finalise the rules, which initially were quite different from what people play today, in that first, only the eight pawns would be on the board. And then the mandatory first eight moves of the game would be to set all the pieces up one by one, not necessarily symmetrically. And only after that, the game, the moves, as we know them in traditional chess, would start. And so we played many games and debated, discussed, you know, should there be bishops on opposite colors squares starting, should castling be allowed, and long story short, after many games we concluded that maybe it would be more harmony to the game to maintain as much as possible of the rules of traditional chess.' Polgar recalled Fischer then reached out to mathematicians trying to find out how many starting positions would there be possible if the starting positions wwre restricted to having bishops on opposite color squares as starting positions, the kings in between the rooks, as well, and maintaining the rights to castle, as well as making sure the pieces are set up symmetrically as well. 'So, as we learned at the time, it turned out to be that there are still 960 different starting positions possible. And since the whole purpose of trying to create this chess variant was to eliminate the opening theories that have been developed, even by the early 90s to his opinion, far too much and taking away too much of the essence of chess, as of two intellectuals trying to outsmart each other or out-strategize each other, he was happy and content that there is no way any human can analyze all 960 starting positions, let alone remember those analyses,' she told Susan Polgar herself took deep interest in endgames, not too fussed over openings. But back then with Fischer in Budapest, Chess960 crystallised. 'And I'm personally very happy that today there are very significant efforts and tournaments being played with exactly the rules that Bobby and I settled on back in around 1993-94. I think it's a great alternative to traditional chess as we know it,' she told
Hindustan Times
22-04-2025
- Sport
- Hindustan Times
Magnus Carlsen: The undisputed king of Freestyle
Bengaluru: Vincent Keymer twirled a captured white pawn between his fingers. The 20-year-old German knew it was over. Sitting across from him, Magnus Carlsen surveyed the board, content with his spoils. Keymer resigned, the spectators' arena erupted in applause, and Carlsen was soon swallowed by the crowd of waiting fans. The world No.1 Norwegian had made history – winning the Grenke Chess Freestyle Open with a perfect 9/9 score. A performance that will perhaps be spoken of in the same breath as Bobby Fischer's brilliant 11/11 at the 1963-64 US Championships, and might even be seen as one that surpasses it. It's only fitting that Carlsen's flawless win came in the Fischer Random or Chess 960 format – one that was conceived by Fischer as a pushback against the thrust on theory, memorisation and preparation in chess. 'I haven't done this before and I'm not going to be able to do it again, that's for sure,' a pleased Carlsen said moments after, 'so it's just incredible. Of course, I knew coming in today (Sunday) that there was a chance, but I didn't really believe it until the very end when it was certain. It's just relief and joy…it's the kind of performance that you don't get to experience very often or basically ever.' Carlsen's Grenke win with a €60,000 prize check comes less than a week after he won the Paris Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, without needing a tiebreak through the knockout stage. What makes Carlsen's feat astounding is his dominance irrespective of format – classical, rapid, blitz, and now, Fischer Random, which was supposed to be difficult and make for a level playing field in the absence of opening theory to fall back on. He stepped away from classical chess and chose not to defend his world title (after winning it five times), since presumably winning no longer seemed fun and preparation, cumbersome. He turned to Fischer Random for unpredictability, chaos, and a fresh frontier to conquer. 'Carlsen is making the same mistake in his new game as he made in chess,' Grandmaster Anish Giri wrote on X in his typical wry style, 'He is completing it too quickly.' 'I played just one 2700 plus player, it should be mentioned,' said Carlsen, 'It's such a tough tournament, playing two games a day against so many hungry players. 'I didn't really think about it (scoring 9/9), until after I won my game against Parham (Maghsoodloo). Then I thought well, I'm not going to get a better chance than this. This (achievement) is way up there. It's the kind of thing I aim for these days.' He had scored 9/9 in the SuperUnited Rapid and Blitz Croatia 2023, in blitz. But a flawless score in the chess960 classical time control, should hit differently. Carlsen's aura was hard to miss in the tournament. Ahead of his game against eight-time French champion Etienne Bacrot, Carlsen was met with an unusual request. Bacrot pulled out his phone and clicked a selfie with Carlsen as the arbiter waited patiently. Both before and after games in the German city of Karlsruhe, Carlsen was surrounded and followed by crowds, hunting for autographs and selfies. 'There's nowhere to hide,' Carlsen smiled, 'That's why I don't play too many of these (open) tournaments.' Before the ninth and final round began, German entrepreneur and founder of the Freestyle series Jan Henrik Buettner was in attendance in the playing hall. Keymer, who won the year's first Freestyle event in Weissenhaus, appeared to be putting up a brave fight and the position seemed equal before he ran into time trouble and the game slipped away from his hands. 'The last game (against Keymer) was a bit of a slugfest,' said Carlsen, 'I was mainly trying to hang in for most of the game. He got down on time, I took my chances and that's how history was made.' Carlsen had already won the Grenke event with a round to spare before his result against Keymer saw him speedrunning it to perfection. 'It's very nice to sit at the board and know that I'm really going to enjoy the process of playing a game because that doesn't always happen when I play tournaments... I'm playing for the joy of the game and these little achievements are a bonus even if it's a huge one.'
Al Etihad
09-04-2025
- Sport
- Al Etihad
UAE's Alserkal invited to big league in Norway after WGM status
10 Apr 2025 01:24 KUUMAR SHYAM (ABU DHABI)It's heady days for Rouda Alserkal, the newly crowned first woman Grandmaster of UAE chess. Fresh from her norm being ratified, the 15-year-old will be heading to Norway to participate in a tournament with heavyweights of the chess world, on a special invite by organisers of the Norway Chess a press conference in Dubai at the Seven Seas hotel on Wednesday evening, it was confirmed that Alserkal will be travelling to the coastal city of Stavanger to participate in the May 26 to June 6 to Aletihad on her way to the conference, Alserkal said the news has barely sunk in. "When I saw the message, when I woke up about a week ago, I could not believe it; it sounded too good to be true, you know, like a scam. But then my club – Abu Dhabi Chess & Mind Games Club (ADCC) – confirmed it," the excited teen Norway Chess Open will be the home event of world No.1 and five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen, besides big names such as D Gukesh, current world champion and India's youngest to do so, Hikaru Nakamura, the Fischer Random chess world champion, India's first WGM Koneru Humpy and many more."I was very close to beating [India WGM] Dronavalli Harika in a rapid game at the Asian Chess Championship. I lost eventually, but that game gave me belief. When I received this [Norway] news, I told my coach immediately that I need to start preparing," she belief turned into determination as she doubled up her training hours from the four hours she used to dedicate to it before achieving the WGM norm last November. She did not wait for her title to be ratified, which was last week. "I have cut down on my fun time. But I am not really complaining about that because if I want to achieve greatness, of course, I'll have to sacrifice something."I was speaking to Salem Saleh [the only Grandmaster UAE had until Alserkal] two days ago, and we discussed openings and endgames as areas I must focus on more. Besides, with opportunities like this, I want to target entering the 2,300 Elo rating mark," said Alserkal, adding that she is looking forward to potential interactions with elite players and gaining insights during the Alserkal's achievements, Norway Chess managing director Kjell Madland said: "She stands tall as an inspiration for women in this region to achieve. The Norway Chess Open provides a great opportunity for Grandmasters and chess players to hone their skills and gain competitive exposure. "We hope to find and encourage many future chess stars from the Middle East to play in the Norway Chess Open." Madland also expressed interest in creating future synergies with potential partners in the Grandmaster group, in which Alserkal has been invited to participate, will have nine rounds, with opportunities for title norms and a prize fund of €13, Alawlaqi, the media spokesperson of ADCC, said it was a source of pride to see one of their own flourishing. "What Rouda has achieved is not just for herself, but for the whole country. We are now looking at our other players now to reach such levels. This partnership with Norway Chess recognises the hard work we have put in with events such as the AD Chess Festival, which is popular in many parts of the world, how far Abu Dhabi has come with its public reputation and having many such partnerships in the UAE and abroad."
