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The Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour 2025 is a series of Chess960 tournaments organized by Freestyle Chess Operations. The tour will take place through the entire year of 2025 at five different locations. This includes the recently concluded first event at Weissenhaus, Germany along with Paris, New York, Delhi and Cape Town. Every event has a $750,000 prize pool which includes $200,000 for the winner. The event had a wonderful debut in Weissenhaus, Germany where home-boy Vincent Keymer took the win.
Every event on this tour contains 10 players. This includes the top three of the previous Grand Slam, top three by classical rating, the winner of a major classical tournament, two tournament wildcards and the winner of Chess.com’s play-ins. The last spot in the tournament has an online open-qualifier round allowing players from around the globe to participate. The first event featured big names like Magnus Carlsen, D Gukesh, Hikaru Nakamura, etc. The wildcard entry Vincent Keymer ended up winning this event.
It’s amazing to see growing passion for freestyle: Thomas Harsch
The Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour events are based around the Chess960 format which is an unique format that brings about a factor of unpredictability and looks to promote creativity. In this format, the starting positions of the pieces on the first and eighth row of the chess board are not according to the classic rules and may be out of the 960 possible permutations. This eliminates the use of memorized openings and pushes players to think at a different strategic depth.
The Freestyle COO Thomas Harsch was extremely delighted about the growing popularity of the format. He said, “The reach of this event has been incredible-almost three times as much as new year.” The success of the online community streams also showed the rise of the format among chess enthusiasts. He also added, “It’s amazing to see the growing passion for freestyle and the energy of the community behind it.”
