Exciting news about Freestyle Chess by J.Buettner

[pohl4711]

This year: November 21th: 2 days Freestyle head-to-head between Carlsen and Caruana, in Singapore, right before the WC-match of Gukesh vs. Ding

2025: 5 Freestyle Tournaments with 750.000 Dollar price-fund for each tournament = 3.750.000 Dollar in total.
First event from February, 7th, in Germany (Weissenhaus), summer event in New York, fall event in South Africa.

2026: 6 Freestyle Tournaments with 1.000.000 Dollar price-fund for each tournament = 6.000.000 Dollar in total.

So, nearly 10.000.000 Dollars for the players in the next 2 years. Incredible amount of money...
J.Buettner mentioned: This is like the Grand Slams in Tennis, the goal is "to make the players rich, to make the players stars".

Personally, I like this whole concept a lot. Dont get me wrong: For all players below (lets say) 2600 Elo, Freestyle chess is not needed and not a good idea (same for enginechess, here my UHO openings do a much better job). But for the top human players, Freestyle Chess with classical thinking-time is a great idea. IMHO.

And any event, Carlsen is participating, is interesting for the chess world. And J.Buettner also mentioned, the whole Freestyle Events are "build around Carlsen". And Carlsen already comitted himself, playing these events in the next 2 years.

[Peter Berger]

Dont get me wrong: For all players below (lets say) 2600 Elo, Freestyle chess is not needed and not a good idea ..

Why do you think so?
To some extent my own reasoning is the exact opposite of yours. I used to play chess seriously at amateur level like 25-30 years ago and had to give it up for a few decades because of real life.

Like once every one or two years I visit one of my old chess clubs to play some blitz. It is still fun and part of me would really like to return to team tournament chess now that I used to enjoy a lot. I can still kind of play in a reasonable way (though a bit rusty of course), major problem is the openings. Nearly all of my old openings are broken these days, and people know, because they can look things up with Stockfish for a few seconds, and it will show them at once. In fun blitz games this is not so serious as I can just play some random shit and go with it. But in a tournament game I would be completely hopeless against someone who continued to maintain his/her openings even to a very minor extent. So I'd have to build a complete new repertoire to be kind of competitive - I don't want to invest the time needed for that.

Chess960 would be a great solution for this problem. I could simply do a few puzzles to get back in some kind of shape and play, without having to worry about Stockfish and friends input.

When I watch the games of very strong human masters for entertainment the exact opposite applies. They are just too strong for me to really follow their ideas in chess960 - especially the opening phase just feels kind of random, and I get bored. In normal chess it is not quite that bad - at least I usually understand the basic ideas of their setups, having looked at this starting position for a few decades.

[pohl4711]

IMHO, Chess below the top-level players needs and benefits from known openings and the knowledge of the players.
And for me, as a spectator, the "normal" chess openings are easier to understand than Chess960 games.

[Koivisto]

IMHO, Chess below the top-level players needs and benefits from known openings and the knowledge of the players.
And for me, as a spectator, the "normal" chess openings are easier to understand than Chess960 games.

As a roughly master level player I have to agree it's very difficult to follow chess960. Piece placements and structures are often quite different, and I find it impossible to remember complete games.