Magnus Carlsen at a World Championship: Everything you need to know about first official Freestyle Chess World Championship

The contenders this time: Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian, Fabiano Caruana, Vincent Keymer, Javokhir Sindarov, Hans Niemann and Nodirbek Abdusattorov. Arjun Erigaisi will be India’s sole challenger in the fray.

The glaring absences: 2022 World Fischer Random Champion, Hikaru Nakamura, was invited to compete, but he declined his invitation, due to multiple reasons. One of them was to focus on the upcoming Candidates tournament. Also missing are top Indians like world champion Gukesh Dommaraju and Praggnanandhaa.

The prize money on offer: The total prize fund for the weekend is $3,00,000, with $1,00,000 (approximately Rs 90.5 lakh) awarded to the FIDE Freestyle Chess World Champion.

The venue: The Weissenhaus Private Nature Luxury Resort will host the event. It’s a luxury resort set on 75 hectares natural scenery on the Baltic Sea.

The tournament format: The event will open with a rapid round-robin stage on 13 February, followed by knockout matches on 14 February and the final, which will be held on 15 February. On the first day, all players will face each other once with a 10+5 time control being used. The top 4 players after this will advance to the semis. The semis on Saturday and the final on Sunday will be played as four-game matches, with each game being played in a 25+10 time control.

Freestyle Chess explained: Freestyle chess is a variant of chess that goes by many names: Fischer Random Chess, Chess 9LX and Chess 960. How it differs from regular chess is that instead of positions of chess pieces on the back ranks being fixed, in freestyle chess positions of these pieces are randomised at the start of the game. The eight pawns in front of these pieces start where they usually do. But the back ranks will not necessarily have rooks stationed on the corners, the knights starting on the b and g files, the bishops on c and f files.

The format was made popular by chess legend Bobby Fischer way back in 1996. Fischer believed — and guys like Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura agree — that Chess960 promotes creativity from players. It gets players out of the book from the first move as the unique position eliminates all the opening theory that players like Fischer and Carlsen say make chess very theoretic and bookish in the opening phase.

Names like Chess960 have been given to the format because there are 960 possible starting positions on the board when the minor and major pieces at the back ranks are shuffled.

Chess pieces in Freestyle Chess still retain their regular characteristics in action: rooks move in straight lines, bishops cut across the board in sweeping diagonal movements, the knights make sickle-like veering motions and retain the ability to hop over pieces.