Making a brief lil entry in this wonderful territory I have on mute (who cares about sports?!), because The Economist is running a Magnus Carlsen op-ed—and chess definitely (maybe?) qualifies as sport! (Magnus = LeBron, or Tom Brady, or Wayne Gretzky; just the unbeatable and unquestionably best the game has probably ever seen.)
Why freestyle? Following my fifth consecutive victory in the World Chess Championship in 2022, I announced that I would no longer defend the title. Many speculated that I was exhausted, or that I was scared of the next generation of players. On the contrary, my passion for chess remains as strong as ever, and I am as ambitious as I’ve always been. What changed was my perspective on the format of the classical world championship itself.
So freestyle chess, for the uninitiated, is a version of standard chess where the back rank of pieces are shuffled randomly (subject to some rules, i.e. bishops of opposite colors; king in-between the rooks).
This avoids all forms of opening repertoire, the memorization of which has become the main way to get ahead in the top echelons of competitive chess.
Freestyle Chess lowers barriers to entry for aspiring players, by diminishing a reliance on exhaustive, theoretical study and on access to high-performance computing. This opens opportunities for underrepresented regions that brim with untapped talent and enthusiasm. In the same way that young Brazilians kick around a football on dusty patches with dreams of going further, we are going to see young folk in Africa and elsewhere turning to chess in a much bigger way.
Here's Magnus' objection to exactly that tendency of top chess:
The issue lay elsewhere, in the months of grinding preparation leading up to the event. Modern World Chess Championships demand endless memorisation of computer-generated opening lines, reducing the sport’s artistry to rote learning. As someone who treasures the creativity of chess, I wanted to focus more on this aspect of the game. [...] the players must rely on intuition, creativity and raw mental acuity—qualities I believe embody the essence of chess.
What's so interesting to see is that games, as soon as move 4 or so, can end up in compleeetely lost positions—and there's plenty more dynamics, with lots of chaos on the board. Very fun for the players; even more fun for us amateurs to watch.
Also, Fabiano Caruana, another top-player and one-time challenger for Magnus' title, is know to have insane heart rates during games (there was recently a one-to-one game between him and Magnus in Singapore, where they measured their heart rates... Fabi crazy; Magnus like he's asleep):
We even monitored heart rates, providing a novel layer of drama. At one critical moment Fabiano’s pulse spiked to 170 beats a minute, while I was pleased to remain comparatively calm under pressure.
Freakin wonderful drawing of our dude too:
non-paywalled here: https://archive.md/RxVJw