In Freestyle Chess World Championship, Magnus Carlsen has found a stage that excites him

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When Carlsen was asked how important the Freestyle Chess variant was for him personally, he pounced on his chance to make a statement.

“I’m grateful for the opportunity to come here and participate in a world championship. But you know there’s a time to prepare for the games and we’re sitting here and wasting our time when we could be preparing. So I think that is not something you should do in an official world championship. But that’s just my two cents,” Carlsen said, with another look at his wrist watch, this glance more exaggerated.

The emcee for the evening tried once again to engage with Carlsen, asking him about the format which dictated that of the eight players in contention on Friday, four would go through into the semis on Saturday after a single round robin.

“I like the fact that it’s cut-throat and it’s not going to be easy to come through for anybody, further strengthening the point that we should not be sitting right here,” said Carlsen, his lips curling into a smile that he usually wears when he’s said something cheeky.

Carlsen’s desperation to get back to his training just before the start of a game in freestyle chess was a strange one. With 959 possibilities of what the opening position of the board could look like, players only find out about 10 minutes before the start of a game what position they are playing. (The 960th option is the regular chess opening position. So it’s not used in freestyle.) And there was a 57-minute gap between Carlsen exiting the stage from the press conference and the first draw to find out the opening position of the first game of the day. So what precisely was he training for?

We may have to wait for the answer on that one, but Carlsen’s pointed reminders that he needed to get back to preparing for his games was an indicator of just how seriously he takes the variant and the newest world championship on the calendar. These were unconquered lands that the unquestionable monarch of the sport wanted to bring under him. Since his abdication of the world champion’s throne in 2022, Carlsen has eased away from playing classical chess to focus his energies on playing online events or the faster time controls of rapid and blitz. But freestyle is truly a variant that commands his attention.

Just to understand the mindset of a man who is in contention to be the greatest proponent of chess in history, listen to what his longtime coach Peter Heine Nielsen had to say in 2024, when he was contrasting the hunger Carlsen felt at the FIDE World Cup in 2023 to his lack of appetite for the classical world championships. The World Cup was also a classical tournament, but it was an event that Carlsen had never won in repeated attempts. And then, just a year after Carlsen walked away from defending his classical world championship crown, he won the FIDE World Cup.

“It will sound strange, but winning the world championship when you’re the overwhelming favourite against just one opponent… he’s done it many times. But he had never won the World Cup where you play 128 players. You have to win a lot of knockout matches. This also explains why the World Championship is something he quit playing. But the joy I felt from him after he won the World Cup or from winning the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Championship in 2022 was extraordinary and something I didn’t expect. Winning World Championship matches with Vishy (Anand in 2013 and 2014) felt great, because we never took it for granted. With Magnus, at some point, we took it for granted,” Heine Nielsen had told The Indian Express in 2024.

Now, just contrast his desperation to train for an unknown opening position at the Freestyle World Championship with him playing at Norway Chess last year. The event is the only classical chess tournament on his calendar these days. Carlsen’s prep for the long grind of Norway Chess games would be long stints on the golf course with Heine Nielsen. At least once, the golf went on for so long that he would rush back to the hotel to return his golf clubs, change and then had to hurry to the playing hall for his game that day.

But at the FIDE Freestyle World Championship, Carlsen was locked in. After the opening position is revealed to the players, players playing with the same colour get to discuss tactics with others on a physical chess board. In each discussion, Carlsen would come alive, spending plenty of time giving his inputs as he maneuvered the pieces in frantic blur. No surprise then, that Carlsen, right after winning the previous Grand Slam Tour of Freestyle Chess, also claimed the Freestyle Chess World Championship.

The greatest chess player of this generation has finally found a stage that excites him. For now.

Amit Kamath is Assistant Editor at The Indian Express and is based in Mumbai. He primarily writes on chess and Olympic sports, and co-hosts the Game Time podcast, a weekly offering from Express Sports. He also writes a weekly chess column, On The Moves. ... Read More

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