“Freestyle chess” is a new name for the variant where the back rank pieces are placed randomly, so as to make the game more a test of skill and imagination than memory of book openings. It used to be called Fischer Random after its inventor, then Chess 960 or Chess 9LX after the number of possible starting positions.
Elite grandmasters like it, and this week a $200,000 event took place at the Weissenhaus resort on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast. Half of the eight competitors, including the world No 1, Magnus Carlsen, and the world champion, Ding Liren, were over-30s, while the other four were under-21s.
