Why Praggnanandhaa isn't part of Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour despite recent victory in Tata Steel Chess Masters
Why 2025 Tata Steel Chess champion R Praggnanandhaa won't be competing in Germany for the first round of the Freestyle Tour.
Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu will miss the first event of the inaugural Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, set to be held in Weissenhaus, Germany this month, despite the biggest victory of his career so far in a tremendous performance at the Tata Steel Chess Championship in Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands.
Pragg’s failure to qualify through Freestyle’s online qualification tournament last month means that he failed to make the cut for the inaugural Freestyle event, which will invite 10 players under different criteria to participate in the curtain-raiser in Germany.
The Freestyle Tour, headed by German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner and supported by world number one and five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen, is set to begin after a frictional and controversial battle against FIDE. The Freestyle Tour is played in theChess960 variant of the game, also known as the Fischer Random Variant, in which the back-rank pieces are assorted randomly.
Carlsen has championed the use of the Fischer Random Variant in chess as an alternative to the classical format, in an age where he has argued that chess supercomputers have made high-level games too predictable. However, he has found himself at ends with governmental body FIDE, particularly over rights for Freestyle to crown their own world champion.
Gukesh India's sole flagbearer for first Freestyle round
The only Indian player who will be present in Germany for the first round of this five-legged initial tour is world champion Gukesh D, who qualified into the slot saved for the world champion after his victory over China’s Ding Liren in the World Chess Championship final last year.
Indian legendary grandmaster Viswanathan Anand was also scheduled to participate, but withdrew from the tournament due to his conflicting loyalties as deputy president of FIDE. Pragg joined Anand as only the second Indian champion at Tata Steel with his blitz tiebreak victory in Wijk aan Zee over Gukesh.
The Freestyle Tour gets underway on the Northern coast of Germany this week, before four more rounds to complete the inaugural edition of the tournament. These will be held in Paris in April, New York City in July, take a trip to New Delhi in September, before closing out with a fifth and final leg in Cape Town in South Africa in December.
