Freestyle Chess takes centre-stage in quick time, gives FIDE plenty of reasons to ponder over future

“Yeah, I do think it’s definitely the future of the sport. Not the immediate near future but for the next-to-next generation, or maybe a century later, at some point in the future. But probably it won’t happen in the next 10 years.”

In an exclusive interaction with Firstpost a little over a month before he made an impressive debut in the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour in Paris, Arjun Erigaisi stated that he did not expect the Fischer Random format to surpass Classical chess anytime in the near future. The Indian Grandmaster’s comment was in contrast with what world No 1 Magnus Carlsen and Freestyle Chess co-founder Jan Henric Buettner have been claiming in recent months.

Carlsen has gone to the extent of publicly expressing his dislike for the Classical format – which led to the Norwegian chess star voluntarily vacating his World Championship in 2022 instead of defending in order to become a six-time world champion.

And Carlsen’s support for Freestyle Chess at the cost of the Classical format also came at a time when the world No 1 found himself feuding with FIDE, the Lausanne-based world governing body that has been in existence for more than a century.

The feud that escalated with the infamous ‘ jeansgate scandal’ in December reached an all-time high when FIDE firmly denied Freestyle Chess permission to conduct ‘World Championships’, stating that only the governing body for the sport had the authority to organise tournaments that could produce world champions.

While Buettner and Carlsen reluctantly admitted defeat on the ‘World Championship’ front, they certainly can’t complain with regards to how the inaugural Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour has turned out so far.

How Freestyle is dominating the chess conversation in 2025

We’re nearly done with the fourth month of the year and Freestyle Chess has already successfully conducted two events – the inaugural event taking place in Germany’s Weissenhaus in February, two months before the Paris event.

The third event is set to take place a couple of months away, with the caravan moving to the United States, where it will set camp in Las Vegas in July. That, however, has not stopped Freestyle Chess from continuing to hog headlines at present.

Four days after the conclusion of the Paris Grand Slam, where Carlsen emerged as the winner after defeating world No 2 Hikaru Nakamura in an ‘El Chessico’ final, another Freestyle Chess event got underway. Germany is currently hosting its second Freestyle event of the year, with the Grenke Chess Freestyle Open taking place in Karlsruhe.

And the hectic schedule has not prevented some of the top names in the world, including Carlsen, Erigaisi and Fabiano Caruana, from competing at the event. Even controversial American GM Hans Niemann, who was at the centre of the infamous cheating scandal in 2022 that led to a $100 million federal lawsuit, has made his Freestyle debut at this event after staging a mysterious pull-out from the Paris Grand Slam right before the event got underway.

FIDE, on the contrary, has hardly been in the conversation between staging the World Championship matches in December and in April, won by D Gukesh and Ju Wenjun, respectively. And the only non-Freestyle events that have come close to getting the kind of attention that the lucrative Grand Slam Tour has so far are the Tata Steel Chess (January and February) and Prague Chess (March), neither of which is a FIDE event.

FIDE will inevitably return to the conversation when it conducts the World Cups in the ‘Women’ and ‘Open’ categories later this year, the latter taking place in India in the month of November.

There’s also the Grand Swiss that’s scheduled to take place in September, while the Rapid and Blitz Championships will be conducted in December, exactly a year after Carlsen decided to show up in a pair of jeans, violating the dress code and controversially sharing the blitz title with Ian Nepomniachtchi.

Having a finger on the pulse on the current generation

However, the manner in which Freestyle Chess has been dominating the conversation as far as the sport of chess goes in the first half of the year, as well as the fact that the Tour spans the entire year, certainly will not make the bosses in the governing body happy.

Add to that the fact that the Grand Slam Tour will be reducing time controls from the Las Vegas event onwards, with the knockouts set to feature 45-minute games with 10-second increments, compared to 90 minutes and 30-second increments that were in place in the first two events.

The decision, which came about following a suggestion from Carlsen’s father Henrik as revealed by Buettner, certainly highlights the fact that Freestyle Chess has a finger on the pulse of the current generation and their short attention spans, and knows how to capitalise on it.

Compare that with FIDE, which had hosted a couple of world championships in the ‘Fischer Random’ format, in 2019 and 2022 respectively, but failed to make the most of the format’s potential, cancelling the 2024 edition of the event.

FIDE might have brushed off the threat from Freestyle Chess, assuming it to be another version of the Professional Chess Association, which was a short-lived rival organisation created by the legendary Garry Kasparov in the 1990s.

The challenge from Freestyle Chess, however, might not be like anything that FIDE has faced in its 100 years of existence.