All posts tagged: Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour 2025

Freestyle Chess organisers and FIDE bury hatchet to announce FIDE Freestyle Chess World Championship | Chess News

Freestyle Chess organisers and FIDE bury hatchet to announce FIDE Freestyle Chess World Championship | Chess News

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After a long and public squabble, FIDE and the organisers of Freestyle Chess have buried the hatchet and agreed to jointly host a World Championship in the freestyle format this year. Called the FIDE Freestyle Chess World Championship, the event will be hosted in Weissenhaus from February 13–15. In essence this will be the fifth world championship in the sport besides the classical World Chess Championship (which is the most prestigious and held every two years), the World Rapid Championship and the World Blitz Championship (which are held together at the end of each year) and the newly-announced Total Chess World Championship, which will go live from 2027 after a pilot event this year. FIDE, the global governing body of chess, announced that the new World Championship will be “governed by FIDE in collaboration with Freestyle Chess”. FIDE said that six players have already qualified for the eight-player event, based on their results during the 2025 Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour: Magnus Carlsen, Arjun Erigaisi, Levon Aronian, Fabiano Caruana, Vincent Keymer, and Javokhir Sindarov. Two …

Arjun Erigaisi defeats Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in game 1 of 5th place playoff

Arjun Erigaisi defeats Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in game 1 of 5th place playoff

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Arjun Erigaisi defeated Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in 41 moves with black pieces in the playoff for the 5th place at the Paris leg of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour on Sunday. Both players will be back on Monday to play the second game with colours reversed. At the Paris leg of the Freestyle Chess event, Arjun is already assured to be the best finishing Indian out of the four players who competed. While reigning world champion Gukesh and Vidit Gujrathi finished joint 11th, Praggnanandhaa finished ninth in the standings after defeating Richard Rapport. If Arjun finishes in 5th place at the Paris event, he will take home a cool $50,000 (approximately Rs 43 lakh). How Arjun Erigaisi defeated Maxime Vachier-Lagrave The game started with position number 103 being drawn and Arjun finding himself in a huddle with other players who were also playing with black pieces on Sunday — Ian Nepomniachtchi, Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura. The three veterans did all the talking in the huddle over the chessboard, while Arjun sat at a distance, …

How Arjun Erigaisi beat Nepo by offering up his all-conquering queen as sacrifice

How Arjun Erigaisi beat Nepo by offering up his all-conquering queen as sacrifice

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It was a move that made the jaws of elite grandmasters drop and Ian Nepomniachtchi’s heart rate spike. With one flick of the wrist, Arjun Erigaisi had thrown a Hail Mary on the board that made his opponent ponder for 17 minutes about a response. And even after that prolonged period of thought, the Russian ended up making a blunder with his reply. 12 moves later, Arjun was victorious, pushing the playoff for the 5th to 8th spot at the Paris leg of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour into a tiebreaker. In the tiebreakers later on, played with 10 minutes on clock for both players, Arjun won the first game with white before defending out of his skin with black pieces to salvage a draw and secure a spot in the fifth-place playoff at the Paris tournament. The move itself — pushing his queen to the d8 square (12. Qd8), thus offering it up as a sacrifice for Nepo’s rook stationed at f8 — sent the Russian’s heart pumping blood at 125 beats per …

Even legends of game can be caught out of depth in variant

Even legends of game can be caught out of depth in variant

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For nearly an hour on Wednesday, Hikaru Nakamura had the overpowering urge to strangle Ian Nepomniachtchi. The American and the Russian grandmaster were not actually paired to face each other in the quarter-finals of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour’s Paris event — Nakamura was jousting with India’s Arjun Erigaisi, while Nepomniachtchi was parrying off attacks from Germany’s Vincent Keymer. The urge to cause bodily harm to another player was born from the fact that Nakamura had blindly copied Nepomniachtchi’s suggestions for a risky gambit in the opening with the black pieces in Position 841. That ploy, against a player of Arjun’s ‘mad-man’ credentials, had almost backfired and led to defeat. It’s an idiosyncrasy of the Freestyle/Fischer Random chess variant — which is particularly highlighted at the Freestyle Chess events — that even early adopters and legends of the game like Magnus Carlsen and Nakamura constantly find themselves out of depth. Almost like they are re-learning how to walk again after spending years in space. It must be pointed out that compared to the Indian …

Arjun Erigaisi defeats Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in game 1 of 5th place playoff

Arjun Erigaisi qualifies for knockouts of Paris Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour as Gukesh, Pragg, Vidit stumble

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If any Indian can contend against some of the world’s best chess players in the freestyle format, it has to be Arjun Erigaisi. He was the only one from the country to qualify for the knockout rounds of the Paris leg of the Grand Slam Tour. Those who failed to advance included R. Praggnanandhaa, Classical world champion D. Gukesh and Vidit Gujrathi. The fairytale, which began on Monday when Arjun took down World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen in just 29 moves and the third highest-rated player in history – USA’s Fabiano Caruana – in 35 moves in the opening two rounds, ended on Tuesday when he finished fourth in the standings after 11 gruelling rounds of rapid classifications games. Arjun, who had pocketed three wins going into the second day, grabbed two more victories to finish with 6.5 points out of a possible 11 behind Carlsen, Ian Nepomniachtchi and local favourite Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. Story continues below this ad When the day started, it was all about Gukesh’s redemption as he began with two consecutive wins …

Gukesh finally wins a freestyle game; Arjun Erigaisi takes down Carlsen and Caruana

Gukesh finally wins a freestyle game; Arjun Erigaisi takes down Carlsen and Caruana

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Gukesh Dommaraju’s first mistake in the battle against Hikaru Nakamura on Monday came even before they had sat on the board. In what was one of the most intense huddles of the evening in Paris, during the second leg of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour on Monday, Gukesh spent 10 minutes talking tactics over the board with stars like Ian Nepomniachtchi, Hikaru Nakamura, Praggnanandhaa, Nodirbek Abdusattarov and his world championship second, Vincent Keymer. The six players were wargaming their moves with black pieces for the sixth and final classification game on Monday. At the other end of the playing hall, another equally accomplished group of players led by Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Vidit Gujrathi and Arjun Erigaisi were plotting their own moves with white pieces. Story continues below this ad It’s one of the unique aspects of the Freestyle Chess event that players only find out about the starting position for a match — in this case, position no 60 — 10 minutes before it actually begins. So, players are allowed to talk to …

Freestyle organisers drop ‘world champion’ from regulations ahead of Weissenhaus event | Chess News

Freestyle organisers drop ‘world champion’ from regulations ahead of Weissenhaus event | Chess News

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There was a temporary truce in the world of chess after FIDE announced that organisers of Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour had removed the phrase ‘world championship’ from their regulations. This means that the winner of the Freestyle Chess Tour will not be officially called a Freestyle World Champion, as the organisers had initially intended. “Today, the organisers of the ‘Freestyle Chess Tour’ fully deleted from its regulations the reference to the ‘World Championship’ title. Following this change in the regulations, players wishing to participate in the 2025 ‘Freestyle Chess Tour’ are no longer required to sign the waiver note,” FIDE posted on their social media handles. The intent of Freestyle Tour’s organisers to crown the winner of their event as a ‘world champion’ had been the sticking point between the global governing body of chess and organisers. The first event of the Freestyle Tour will be held in Weissenhaus later this week, with events also planned for New York, Paris, New Delhi and Cape Town. Story continues below this ad “As the regulations of …