Freestyle Chess Tour 2025

[Paul Cooksey]

After all the politics some almost chess started today.

I'm baffled why it is rapid event since most of the publicity seemed to be about the burden of theory on classical. But I am going to watch some of it to see if I enjoy it.

As well as a dozen streamers they do have Leko and Polgar on commentary. I am hoping Portisch makes a guest appearance.

[Joey Stewart]

They probably realised that for it to be viable they needed a quickly obtained audience composed of largely chess.com players and streamer chats to justify their sponsorship money - unfortunately that also means a fan base composed largely of casuals, the lowest common denominator in chess, and those types struggle to pay attention to long games. I was watching a bit of the live stream myself and even at rapid time control there was still a lot of complaining that it was too slow and why couldn't they play blitz or bullet.

If I were more cynical I might also speculate that certain prominent players among the freestyle community who are already very naturally talented in piece development would find a quicker time control makes it much more difficult for their opponents to think of ideas and helps stack the deck in their favour....

[Kevin Thurlow]

"If I were more cynical I might also speculate that certain prominent players among the freestyle community who are already very naturally talented in piece development would find a quicker time control makes it much more difficult for their opponents to think of ideas and helps stack the deck in their favour...."

People with accurate powers of observation are frequently labelled cynics by those who do not possess those powers.

I have played a few Chess960 tournaments, and it is clear that the better players are even more likely to win than in classical chess, as they quickly put pieces on the right squares. There are some starting positions where one player can lose really quickly if they're unwary. GMs tend not to fall into the same traps. If you get a really weird starting position, it's quite difficult to work out how to get pieces to sensible squares. Chess960 is good for people who don't know opening theory! I have noticed that Carlsen tends to castle very quickly, but I'm not convinced that the king is any safer on the wing than in the middle (given the weird starting positions). But I suppose he must be right.

On another matter, Anna Cramling started a Youtube report on Day 1, and it suddenly said it was removed by the owner of the channel. Did Chess.com claim she was infringing copyright?

[Ian Thompson]

I'm baffled why it is rapid event since most of the publicity seemed to be about the burden of theory on classical. But I am going to watch some of it to see if I enjoy it.

Whilst checking the rules to see how it was possible for 10 players to qualify for the quarter-finals (click on the Day 3 tab) I noticed that the knockout stage is being played at a standard play 90' + 30" time control.

(The answer on the quarter finalists is that Fedoseev and Aronian are not quarter-finalists despite being listed on the quarter-finalists page. They're playing for 9th and 10th places and will then become commentators unless they want to forfeit half their prize money.)

[IM Jack Rudd]

A whole tournament to knock ten players down to eight? It's like the 2021 Copa America all over again.

(That was a weird tournament to watch. Football with no spectators makes for a strange atmosphere. I happened to like it, because I like commentary and dislike crowd noise, but I'm aware of being an outlier here.)

[Joey Stewart]

The tournament ended up being quite a good watch, largely due to excellent commentary by leko and polgar (who would have ever imagined two such massively opposite players could make such a good team).
It very much felt like a changing of the guard, with the younger generation breaking though, I'm sure gukesh would rather never see the variant again in his life but hopefully he can still content himself with the real world championship...

[Paul Cooksey]

The commentary was good. Although I found the games more enjoyable if I skipped the first hour. The castling is a bit problematic for me, feeling like illegal moves.

I'm not sure I can agree a changing of the guard, with Fabi and Magnus doing well.

Anish Giri making a point on twitter that I have made here before that preparation is more important in freestyle than standard chess. The cynic in me wonders if that is a welcome feature in protecting the top players.

[Joey Stewart]

It was interesting to see just how wildly differently players were approaching each starting position, and in several cases ending up with much worse resulting middlegames because of lousy pawn structures. Just goes to show how embedded "theory" in in real chess and how almost all our plans and strategies are based around development from the right starting position - without that crutch even some of the worlds finest players felt like they were clutching at straws at times