Chess-Bored with standard chess? Go Freestyle

PARIS : Finding chess boring? Try shuffling your pieces on the back rank and you get Chess960, or Freestyle chess, a variant of the game that favours creativity over preparation, and backed by chess great Magnus Carlsen.

Chess960, created by former world champion Bobby Fischer in 1996, has been gaining in popularity after an invitational tournament played at the Weissenhaus Luxury Resort, which hosted the G7 Foreign Minister summit in 2022.

In Chess960/Freestyle chess, the pieces on the back rank are reshuffled, meaning that computer-backed preparations leading to sometimes dull openings, are meaningless.

The G.O.A.T. Challenge featured eight players - Carlsen and seven grandmasters handpicked by the Norwegian.

While the International Chess Federation (FIDE) has organised world championships in 2019 and 2022 - with an upcoming one this year - they were played in rapid time control.

The tournament came to life after Carlsen agreed to be involved following a discussion at the chess World Cup in Qatar with German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner.

The event, with a $200,000 prize money, featured a confessional booth, extra cameras and heart rate monitors for the players and, for the first time, Freestyle chess was played in standard (long) time control.

The tournament was played in February, triggering a significant rise in the number of games played on the main two online platforms, Chess.com and Lichess.

Chess.com told Reuters that in January, 493,500 games were played while 628,000 were played in February, with a peak at 27,835 games on Feb. 16, the day the G.O.A.T. tournament finished.

Lichess Chief Executive Officer Thibault Duplessis told Reuters that 605,000 Chess960 games were played in February compared with 502,000 in