World number 1 Chess player Magnus Carlsen met the current FIDE World Champion D Gukesh on Friday ahead of a much-awaited clash between the two players on 8 February, The Guardian reported.
The highest-ranked Indian chess player could not open his stand at the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam tour on Friday as he suffered one loss and managed three draws. Meanwhile, Carlsen also only managed to garner 2 points on Day 1 as he lost two matches and won other two.
“I’m very much looking forward to playing the classical world champion, Gukesh. Obviously, I look forward to playing everybody, but getting a chance to play Hikaru Nakamura here… last year there was a bit of a generational battle. I’ll be trying a little bit harder to beat the youngsters,” Carlsen was recently quoted as saying by ChessBase India.
What are Freestyle chess events?
The freestyle chess events are a brain child of Carlsen and German enterpreneur Jan Henric Buettner and could soon be a permanent fixture for professional chess players, as per a PTI report.
Freestyle is a new name for the Fischer random chess where the chess pieces are randomly set up at the start of the game instead of the conventional chess where they are aligned on both sides. Due to there being 960 different ways to set up a chess board, the Fischer random chess is also called chess 960.
“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”, Gukesh had recently said about the comparison between classical chess and frestyle matches.
Gukesh Vs Carlsen
After his win in Singapore, chess great Magnus Carlsen had said that classical chess was perhaps the “worst way” to measure a player, adding that rapid chess was perhaps a more “pure” form of chess. He said that Gukesh’s World Chess Championship final against China’s Ding Liren looked like a second or third-round match in an open tournament.
However, Gukesh responded to Carlsen after his win in Singapore, stating that he understood that the quality of the games wasn’t always up to the mark, but overall, it was a good championship match. While Gukesh challenged Carlsen to the title, the Norwegian has ruled out such a title clash.
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