Gukesh's coach questions future of Carlsen's Freestyle Chess Tour: 'There’s no guarantee'

D Gukesh’s head coach Grzegorz Gajewski has questioned the future of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour which was recently embroiled in a controversy with the International Chess Federation, FIDE . Gajewski’s comments on Magnus Carlsen’s co-owned Freestyle Operations, which runs the Grand Slam Tour, came while reacting to Gukesh’s poor performance in Stage 1 of the tournament.

Freestyle Tour and FIDE were involved in a heated battle recently over the latter’s plan to use “world champion” for its winner. The FIDE claimed that as the global body of chess only they can award such a title. They also asked players to sign a waiver before taking part in the Freestyle Tour, however, it later became unnecessary as the Freestyle Tour decided against using the term world champion.

They have decided to use “Freestyle Chess Champion” and not “Freestyle Chess World Champion”.

Gajewski questions Freestyle Tour’s future

Stage 1 of the Freestyle Tour took place in Germany earlier this month with chess world champion Gukesh finishing eighth while Germany’s Vincent Keymer won the first leg. Keymer was also part of Gukesh’s coaching team during his successful World Chess Championship 2024 campaign against Ding Liren late last year.

Gukesh’s disappointing performance in the tournament that uses the Fischer Random variant highlighted the need for the 18-year-old to improve his tactical acumen and intuition on the board . However, the Indian Grandmaster’s chief trainer Gajewski is still not sure how much time Gukesh must dedicate towards improving his Freestyle game as he still has a lot to earn in classical chess and there’s no guarantee on how long the Freestyle Tour continue.

“The question though is whether you want to adjust and change the way you look at chess, because, if you adapt to this format, it could potentially backfire in the normal version of the game. So, for us there’s a clear problem of how much time we should devote to Freestyle considering that Gukesh is so young and there are so many things that he has yet to learn in the normal version of the game," Polish Grandmaster Gajewski told the Hindustan Times.

“We’re kind of hesitant about which approach we should choose for him because as exciting and fresh Freestyle is, there’s no guarantee that in two years’ time there will be another Grand Slam Tour and we don’t know in which direction it’s headed,” he added.

Freestyle Tour has been pushed aggressively by world No. Carlsen who feels classical chess has become very predictable and the new tournament can help the sport attract young fans.

Classical chess will be more important: Gukesh

Gukesh, however, is confident that classical will remain the pinnacle of the sport despite Freestyle Tour being a “nice experiment”.

“I think 960 is nice as an experiment, but I don’t see it taking over classical chess. The Classical World Chess Championship cycle will be much more important than 960, so I am glad to experiment with the 960,” he told ChessBase India.

The second leg of the Freestyle Tour will be played in Paris in April. Besides Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi and R Praggnanandhaa from India will also be a part of Stage 2.