How does one train for Freestyle Chess? Sometimes, you just don’t!

The knockout stage of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour in Weissenhaus started off with a bang: with four out of the five games ending in decisive results.World champion Gukesh, playing with white pieces, lost to Fabiano Caruana in 40 moves while there were also wins for Magnus Carlsen (who beat Nodirbek Abdusattarov with white) and Vincent Keymer (who beat Alireza Firouzja with black). Only the Hikaru Nakamura versus Javokhir Sindarov game ended in a draw. All the players will be back on the board with colours reversed on Monday to play in the second game of the match.
There is an unpredictability that comes with playing freestyle chess because there can be 960 possible opening positions. The complexity of playing the variant then gets raised even higher since the players are told their opening position just 15 minutes before the game starts. To top it all off, there is no second time control like there is in events like the Candidates and the World Championship. This means that players are forced to think long and hard from the first move itself and with the knowledge that they only get 30-second increments for each move they make after the initial 90 minutes.
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“(Freestyle chess) is still chess. Pieces still move the same. But openings (in freestyle chess) are gone! No preparation opening-wise before the games. That’s the part of classical chess that most people agree is not the most fun or creative part of classical chess these days. Even five years ago, opening prep was a very creative process, because you could overrule the engines and find things that would surprise the opponent,” said Caruana in an interview with ChessBase India. “With Fischer Random (Freestyle Chess), you just have a few minutes before the game to orient yourself, and then you’re on your own. So is your opponent.”
A day before Caruana and Gukesh faced off in the first game of the two-leg quarter-final, the American was discussing with Nakamura and Firouzja how you could train for a tricky challenge like freestyle chess. In that conversation, Caruana put forth a theory: if you played four rapid games daily in the freestyle format for two years, you could memorise all the 960 starting positions. His theory, unfortunately, found no takers in the audience of two as Nakamura and Firouzja brushed it off.
For many of the players, as Nakamura revealed in an interview with Take Take Take, training for freestyle chess has been a process of unlearning because plenty of theory in chess focuses on opening theory. And in freestyle chess, the opening theory itself would fill out a library.
Nakamura explained how, a few years back he and Carlsen had played a Fischer Random (another name for freestyle chess) game during the Norway Chess tournament where they had been told the opening position they would play 30 minutes before the start of the game. Then, they were told they could talk to their seconds and take help from engines. Despite that, the third move, Nakamura was already out of the book.
INTERACTIVE: How Gukesh lost to Fabiano Caruana
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Come to games fresh
Most elite players rely on training games to sharpen their minds for an upcoming competition. Players usually spent the night before games playing games or looking up lines for hours, and then doing the same in the hours leading up to a match.
Of course for players like Caruana, Gukesh, Vladimir Fedoseev, Abdusattarov and Keymer playing training games to prepare for the Weissenhaus event was not possible, because until five days before the start of the freestyle event, they were competing for a three-week stretch at Wijk aan Zee in a classical tournament.
But even someone like Nakamura or Carlsen, who came to Weissenhaus fresher and well-rested compared to others like Gukesh and Caruana, there were not too many training games.
Carlsen, for example, said that last year he had trained extensively to compete at the freestyle event (which he had won) playing training games against British GM David Howell besides working on openings with long-time second Peter Heine Nielsen. But this year he had done a little training compared to last year.Story continues below this ad
“I felt like last year I was really overthinking in the first few games. I had too much random knowledge and didn’t know how to apply it. This year, I played Freestyle Fridays on Chess.com for training. Otherwise I have looked at a few charts about where pieces go,” Carlsen told Chessbase India.
Nakamura agreed. “Playing too much before is not good. You have to come in fresh. It’s really not worth it to spend much time preparing,” he said.