Freestyle Chess | 12 Feb 2024
Recently, Chess World No 1 Magnus Carlsen faced off against world champion Ding Liren across the chess board in a new, innovative tournament, called Freestyle Chess.
- More recently, Grandmaster D Gukesh of India defeated World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen of Norway, Levon Aronia of Armenia and ultimately the reigning world champion Ding Liren of China on the opening day of the Weissenhaus Chess Challenge.
- Freestyle chess goes by multiple names: Fischer Random Chess, Chess 9LX, and Chess 960 where 960 is the number of possible starting positions on the board when you shuffle your pieces on the last ranks of the board.
- This form of chess differs from the other forms is in the placement of the pieces on the board at the start of the game. All the eight pawns of each colour remain in the second and the seventh ranks on the board like in regular chess.
- The position of the rest of the pieces - the rooks, the bishops, the knights, the queen, and the king -on the first and the last rank changes randomly at the start of the game.
- It must be noted that the pieces still retain their regular characteristics in action: rooks travel in straight lines, bishops saunter diagonally, and so on.
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