CHESS IS the sort of deep and rewarding game that you can spend an enjoyable lifetime failing to master. But even ardent fans might concede that, as a spectacle, watching two players think for long periods before shuffling pieces around a board is somewhat short on sparkle.
On February 7th a new tournament will try to change that. The Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, whose name is borrowed from professional tennis, will take place in a resort on Germany’s Baltic coast. The competition is the brainchild of Magnus Carlsen (a Norwegian player and five-time world champion widely regarded as the best in the world) and Jan Henric Buettner (a German businessman). The idea is to inject as much glitz and glamour as possible, in the hope that chess can be made into a mass-market spectators’ game.
“My wife and I go to Formula 1 races,” says Mr Buettner. “We saw the huge difference between how F1 stars are seen by the public, and how chess players are.” Messrs Carlsen and Buettner have invested their own money and secured $12m from Left Lane Capital, an American investment firm that backed the Kings League, a high-tech seven-a-side football tournament founded in Spain, and League One Volleyball, a startup American women’s league. The hope is to make marketable stars of chess’s (mostly unknown) players.
In addition to Germany’s Baltic coast, the Grand Slam Tour will visit Cape Town, Delhi, New York and Paris. The broadcast will feature all kinds of viewer-friendly innovations. One live-stream, aimed at aficionados, will feature in-depth commentary from grandmasters. The other will be aimed at a mass audience, with chess jargon (“Knight E4”, for instance) forbidden.
The players will be wired to heart-rate monitors to amplify the tension. A computer chess program (which these days are far stronger than any human player) will analyse each move as it happens; a black-and-white bar will ebb and flow according to the machine’s opinion of which rival is ahead. Players will enter “confession booths” during matches, to explain their thoughts to viewers.
But the biggest innovation will be in the sort of chess the participants play. Mr Carlsen has said he has come to dislike classical chess tournaments. (In November he surprised the chess world by refusing to defend his world championship.) The problem, he has said, is that computer analysis has turned the opening phase of the game into a dull contest of rote memorisation, in which players respond to each other’s moves in a way that a machine has already determined is best.
Instead, the tournament will use what it calls “freestyle” chess, and what chess players know as “Fischer Random”, named after Bobby Fischer, an American grandmaster who codified the rules in the 1990s. The idea is to randomise the starting positions of the non-pawn pieces. That means there are 960 possible outcomes, although the tournament will disallow two—the standard start and the standard start with the positions of the king and queen swapped—giving 958 overall.
Confronted with board states they have never seen before, players will be forced to rely more on their own instincts and talents, letting their personalities show through. This style of play also gives more opportunities for viewer-friendly drama: both blunders and brilliance are more likely when players are in unfamiliar territory.
Can glammed-up chess really tear many viewers away from football and Instagram? Perhaps: the covid-19 pandemic caused a spike in interest in the game, as did “The Queen’s Gambit”, a Netflix series released in 2020. A one-off tournament played last year—and won by Mr Carlsen—did much better than expected, according to Mr Buettner.
Mr Carlsen himself is living proof that chess stars can indeed be bankable. He is the first grandmaster since Garry Kasparov, who retired in 2005, to achieve widespread recognition outside the game. He has signed a sponsorship deal with Puma, a sportswear firm, and a modelling contract with G-Star, a Dutch fashion company. Whatever you think of chess, it is worth watching his next move. ■
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