One of the biggest chess960 (also known as Fischer Random) tournaments of all time and one of the first to feature classical time controls, the Freestyle Chess GOAT Challenge is a unique initiative of Magnus Carlsen and his backers to promote a different kind of chess competition.
It features a hand-picked field of some of the brightest players in the world—including Carlsen’s successor as the classical world chess champion, Ding Liren.
The Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T Challenge explained
The rather oddly named Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T Challenge is an invitational chess tournament featuring a well-known variant of the royal game, where the major pieces are randomly shuffled on the first rank before the game to generate unique positions.
This was the brainchild of former world chess champion Bobby Fischer, who modestly named the variant “Fischer Random” to combat the importance of theory and memorization at the highest levels of play. It’s also sometimes referred to as chess960 based on the number of possible starting positions.
Since 2019, the World Chess Federation has hosted its own officially recognized world championship event for the format—but this competition is a little special, and not just because of the star-studded lineup.
It is one of the first high-profile events to feature classical time controls for competitive Fischer Random matches. The games in the round-robin portion come with a rapid 25+10 time control, but the playoffs use the standard 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, with 30 minutes added alongside an additional 30-second increment. If the two games are drawn, faster time controls are used for tiebreaks in the playoff bracket.
The following players will participate in the Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T Challenge:
- Magnus Carlsen
- Fabiano Caruana
- Ding Liren
- Alireza Firouzja
- Vincent Keymer
- Nodirbek Abdusattorov
- Dommaraju Gukesh
- Levon Aronian
Where can you watch the Freestyle Chess GOAT Challenge?
The competition will run from Feb. 9 to 16 and will be broadcast on the freestyle_chess Twitch and YouTube channels, with commentary provided by Tania Sachdev and Péter Lékó.
The schedule is as follows:
- Feb. 9 to 10 – round robin portion for playoffs seeding
- Feb. 11 to 12 – quarterfinals
- Feb. 13 to 14 – semifinals
- Day seven to eight – grand final
You can also follow its social media content on X, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. One of the tournament’s stated goals is to focus on the personalities and skills of the players and to showcase some exciting pre-produced video content about them along the way, so there are sure to be interesting nuggets to find.
