World Champion D. Gukesh began his campaign at the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam tour with three draws and a single loss, indicating that he is gradually adapting to this new format.
The freestyle chess event, created by World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen and German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner, may become a permanent fixture for professional chess players, despite their ongoing conflict with FIDE, the world’s governing chess body.
Freestyle chess is essentially a new term for what was previously known as Fischer Random Chess. This format, introduced by 11th World Champion Bobby Fischer, features randomly arranged pieces at the start of the game, as opposed to the traditional fixed setup.
With 960 different initial board configurations, Fischer Random Chess eventually evolved into Chess 960, and now has a new iteration called Freestyle Chess, as promoted by its creators.
Gukesh, the youngest-ever world champion, made his debut in this format, drawing his first game against Nodirbek Abdusattorov from Uzbekistan and losing his second game to Alireza Firouzja from France. In the third and fourth rounds, he drew with Levon Aronian from the United States and Javokhir Sindarov from Uzbekistan at the Weissenhaus Luxury Resort in Hamburg.
With five rounds remaining in the group stage, Gukesh needs to secure a spot in the top eight out of ten participants to advance to the next stage.
Meanwhile, Carlsen also managed to score only two points in his first four games, winning two and losing two. American players Fabiano Caruana and Sindarov currently share the lead with 3.5 points after four rounds.
