Overview Freestyle Chess is the tour Magnus Carlsen co-founded to play top-level chess from a randomly drawn starting position, so memorized opening theory is no help, and in February 2026 it staged the first FIDE-sanctioned Freestyle Chess World Championship, which Carlsen won over Fabiano Caruana. Carlsen and German investor Jan Henric Buettner started it with a 2024 event at Buettner's Weissenhaus resort on the Baltic coast, then ran a five-stop Grand Slam tour in 2025 through Weissenhaus, Paris, Karlsruhe, Las Vegas and South Africa. FIDE and Freestyle Chess signed a cooperation agreement in January 2026. The year runs on three tracks: the world championships at Weissenhaus each February, the grenke Freestyle Chess Open in Karlsruhe in spring, and Freestyle Friday, a weekly online event on Chess.com. On site The Weissenhaus championship is an eight-player, three-day event: a seven-round rapid round-robin on day one, four-game knockout semifinals on day two, and the final and placement matches on day three. DAZN streamed the 2026 edition live and free to view, with commentary on every round. Karlsruhe is the opposite shape, a nine-round Swiss in the Kongresszentrum at a classical time control, with a new random position drawn for each round. Audience The Karlsruhe open is open to any player, so club amateurs sit in the same hall as the world's best: the 2025 edition drew 570 players across three rating sections, 251 of them in the top section. Freestyle Friday is played weekly by titled players, and its season leaderboards award one seat at each 2027 world championship, open and women's. Talent and Influencers Vincent Keymer won the first Weissenhaus Grand Slam in 2025. Carlsen won Paris and then Karlsruhe with 9 out of 9, and Levon Aronian won Las Vegas and the South Africa final. Hans Niemann and Nodirbek Abdusattorov made the 2026 championship field, and Keymer won Karlsruhe in 2026 on tiebreak over Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. By September 2026, Carlsen, Caruana, Abdusattorov, Keymer and Pranav Venkatesh had qualified for the 2027 open championship, and Bibisara Assaubayeva, Harika Dronavalli, Alua Nurman, Dinara Wagner and Anna Muzychuk for the first women's championship. Track record Each 2025 Grand Slam leg carried a $750,000 prize fund, with $200,000 to the winner. The 2026 championship paid $300,000, $100,000 of it to Carlsen, and gave him the 21st world title of his career. For 2027 the organizers scheduled a separate women's world championship at Weissenhaus the week before the open event. Brand presence The 2026 championship ran with Make as its AI automation partner and Chrono24 on timekeeping, alongside Weissenhaus, Chess.com, Secretlab, Polar, DGT and San Pellegrino. Chess.com also hosts Freestyle Friday, the weekly online event that runs between the February championships.