The Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour might be the worst name I’ve ever heard for an event that is arguably very interesting. Calling it the Grand Slam Tour would make more sense if Magnus Carlsen was going to stop in between manhandling some poor Grandmaster with the black pieces and beat him senseless, but instead, it’s just a really cool chess tournament popularizing Fischer Random.
So what is Fischer Random?
Bobby Fischer was a chess genius. Although he had his flaws, the man was an absolute beast of a chess player who handed the United States their first World Chess Championship after showing the Soviets what could be accomplished by a Jewish boy from Illinois.
At some point, Fischer got bored manhandling the Soviets with the Ruy Lopez opening and pointed out that chess, while not a solved game, felt significantly more boring to him because most of his prep these days was memorizing openings out to the double digit moves. So much of chess was solved because the opening, the part where you start the game, was solved to such high accuracy. You played moves in a specific way to get an advantage, and then the fun part happened (the middle game) and then the fun part happened (the end game). Fischer developed a new kind of chess where the back row of pieces were randomized. There are a few caveats to this randomization, but what resulted was Fischer Random, also known as Chess960, and that’s what they’re playing out there in the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour.
Chess960 remains incredibly popular amongst Grandmasters and other top level players because it forces them to run far less on prep and memorization and far more on actual intuition and calculation (unless you’re Fabiano, who has apparently prepped a significant amount).
Regardless, the Grand Slam had an insane lineup, including the top three from last year’s Freestyle event (World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen, as well as World No 2. Fabiano Caruana and another top fifteen player, Levon Aronian), the top three ranked players outside of this group, (World No. 3 Hikaru Nakamura, No. 6 Nodirbek Abudsattorov, and Alireza Firouzja), several wild cards and, the world chess championship (No. 5 Gukesh Dommaraju). The international wild card, India’s greatest player and former world champion Viswanathan Anand (No. 10) withdrew, and got replaced by Javokhir Sindarov, a teenage Uzbek chess prodigy that reminds me exactly how little I’ve accomplished at the ripe old age of 21.
The first part of the tournament was meant to eliminate the bottom two players, and unfortunately, that was Fedoseev, the online play-in winner, and Aronian, who has been in a battle against Father Time for years. He’s a great player, but it’s hard to sustain success, especially at this sort of event. The following eight players were going to the quarter finals, where they chose their own opponents. The QFs were incredibly exciting, with Keymer upsetting Firouzja with the black pieces, Sindarov narrowly pulling off a draw with the white pieces. Nodirbek got massively outplayed by Carlsen in a game that I genuinely never saw coming, with Carlsen playing a 98 percent accurate game for 23 straight moves, applying early pressure and never letting go. Nodirkbek would lose another game to Carlsen, Keymer would put away Firouzja for good and Sindarov would not perform as expected in the semis after trouncing Hikaru, prompting what could be an early retirement.
Things just kept heating up after that. Sindarov advanced to a game against Caruana that wound up being more than just a game, with the players drawing the classical portions, the rapid and blitz portions, and finally ending up playing an Armageddon game to decide the finalist. Armageddon is a game where the player with the black pieces gets draw odds, i.e., if they draw, they win. It’s a game that’s actually a lot more difficult for white, and somehow, Caruana can just win on demand. In a game that I can only call exhilarating (it was all less than fifteen minutes), Caruana broke down Sindarov’s position and won, moving on to the finals.
In those finals, he got stomped by the hometown hero, Vincent Keymer. Vincent Keym, he saw, and he conquered, and the guy took what should have been the hardest draw in the tournament (Hikaru, Magnus, Caruana), and turned it into a first place finish and a $100,000. It’s an incredible performance by an incredible player who hasn’t had the chance to shine recently, and it’s honest to god a little glorious. Keymer is incredible, and this tournament fully sold me on Freestyle. It’s a bright spark of what makes chess so exciting and interesting, even for lay players.
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