Another Way to Play

In an interview with André Schulz of ChessBase, Jan Henric Buettner, German entrepreneur and owner of Gut Weißenhaus (Grand Village Weissenhaus), recounts how he got to conceive and organise the first-ever Fischerandom chess (chess960) super-tournament at classical time control, named “Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T. Challenge”, to be hosted from February 9–16 in the Weissenhaus Private Nature Luxury Resort in Wangels on the Baltic Sea, Germany. Buettner said he did nothing but fulfill the wishes of unrivaled world No. 1 Magnus Carlsen: “Magnus Carlsen definitely wanted to play Chess960 — I didn’t even know what that was at first. I thought the Random story was great. But the name was too insidery. That’s why it’s now called Freestyle. People understand the name even if they’re not insiders. And G.O.A.T Challenge, because the Greatest Of All Time, Magnus Carlsen, is being challenged”, he said. Other participants, namely: Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Levon Grigori Aronian, Fabiano Caruana, 丁立人 (Dīng Lìrén), Alireza Firouzja, Dommaraju Gukesh, and Vincent Keymer, were also named by Carlsen, who thus hopes to make Fischer’s chess a global brand as well as another Kingdom of his.