Gukesh and the Freestyle chess conundrum

Fischer Random, where starting positions of the back rank pieces are randomised to minimise opening theory, has seen a revival of sorts with world No 1 Magnus Carlsen turning to it, and German entrepreneur Jan Buettner backing the enterprise with a full-blown, multi-continent tour.

“It’s an entirely different game,” Gukesh’s trainer Grzegorz Gajewski told HT, “So many concepts that work in regular chess do not apply in Fischer Random and that can be very confusing. The first move that comes to your mind is quite often a mistake in Fischer Random and it’s going to take some time before we can all adjust.

“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. 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.”

Preparation for Fischer Random isn’t straightforward either. Regular chess evolved over decades. There’s literature, tomes of past games.

“I don’t believe there is a way to prepare for Freestyle in the theoretical sense. We can learn some specific lines, but then you go for the game and the moves you want to make are classical moves and this approach quite often can be misleading. We’ve seen examples where, White gains an almost decisive advantage after 2-3 moves, which does not normally happen,” said Gajewski. “You can get a decent position after the opening in terms of the evaluation, but you might not even know it. Because of those random setups, sometimes you would think a position is fine, but it turns out it’s completely losing because there is this knight on a1 and it’s out of the game. These things don’t come naturally to us, because our experience from classical chess tells us something completely different.”

The only way to prepare for Fischer Random events, Gajewski believes, is to learn the game and try to understand the new patterns. “But at the same time, do we want to learn these patterns? We would love to learn all of these new patterns but we would also love someone to tell us that it will not harm our natural understanding of the game.”

One of Gukesh and his team’s aims since he turned world champion at the close of last year was for him to be dominant in tournaments. Despite being left with little time to prepare in the midst of felicitation marathons, Gukesh put up an impressive performance in his first tournament as world champion – the Tata Steel Masters, in January. He lost in the final tie-breaks to fellow Indian, Praggnanandhaa.

“We want to be as cautious and ambitious as we can possibly be and we obviously want to do better in the future Freestyle events,” Gajewski points out, “But we would not want to take any risk that would potentially endanger Gukesh’s classical quality of play, because, that is what’s the most important. He’s a world champion in classical chess and that’s where our focus is.”

Gukesh has a world title to defend next year. His opponent is still unknown and his Polish trainer is clear about not wanting to turn Gukesh’s schedule into a ceaseless preparation for the match.

“My hope is that we won’t start preparing too early. We’re probably going to start sometime next year. Considering that the game is changing and the way we prepare is changing, for me personally, the priority is for him to improve as a player. Obviously, we want to win, but it can be kind of a trap. If we make it all about the match, then it could potentially hurt his development in the long run.”