Gukesh starts moderately in Freestyle Chess Grand Slam

Hamburg, Germany: World Champion D Gukesh began his campaign at the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam tour with three draws and a lone loss, signalling that he is gradually coming to terms with the new format.

A brainchild of World’s number one Magnus Carlsen and German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner, the freestyle chess event marks the beginning of what could be a permanent fixture for professional chess players despite a showdown with FIDE, the world’s apex chess body.

Freestyle basically is a new name given to what was known as the Fischer random chess –- the name attributed to the 11th world champion Bobby Fischer who advocated this format that has the chess pieces randomly set up at the start of the game instead of conventional chess that sees a fixed alignment of forces on both sides.

Since there are 960 different ways to set up the board initially, Fischer random chess gradually became chess 960 and now sees its latest avatar called the freestyle chess by the promoters of this new format.

Gukesh, the youngest ever world champion, made his foray into the format taking a draw with Nodirbek Abdusattorov of Uzbekistan and lost the second game to Alireza Firouzja of France.

In the third and fourth round, the Indian ace drew with Levon Aronian of United States and Javokhir SIndarov of Uzbekistan at Weissenhaus Luxury resort here.

There are five rounds still to come in the group stage and Gukesh needs to make the cut to get into top eight out of ten participants to go to the next stage.

Meanwhile, Carlsen could also only score two points out of his first four games, losing two and winning two, while American Fabiano Caruana and Sindarov shared the lead on 3.5 points after four rounds.

There was a serious scuffle between FIDE and the Freestyle chess promoters over the world champion’s title to be awarded in this format and for now the latter has decided to keep the world championship tag off the table for the next ten months.

In a recent post on 'X', formerly known as twitter, Carlsen went to the extent of demanding resignation from the FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich, who famously helmed the World Cup (Soccer) in Russia apart from being a deputy prime minister of his country before.

Five times World Champion Viswanathan Anand withdrew from the event some time back after the controversy and the speculative reason could be the fact that he is the deputy President in FIDE.

While the controversy surrounding the new format, it is clear that that promoters mean serious business. Each event has a valuable prize fund of 750000 USD per tournament for five events this year, a figure that is not common.