NEW DELHI: Last week was anything but ordinary in the chaotic realm of elite chess, not because of a single blockbuster match, table slamming, or another jaw-dropping off-the-board spat, but due to the sudden proliferation of “World Championships”. Within days of each other, two major announcements landed on the global chessboard. Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!On one side was the Total Chess World Championship Tour, a collaboration between Norway Chess and FIDE, which unveiled the list of 16 players eligible to receive invitations for its 2026 pilot event scheduled for 3–15 October later this year. Almost simultaneously, FIDE, in partnership with Freestyle Chess, launched the FIDE Freestyle Chess World Championship, which splashed water on the burning, long-standing tussle.
The optics are impossible to ignore. Two “world championship” labels with similar promises of global reach and big prize money.For now, the Total Chess World Championship Tour remains officially a work in progress. The 2026 edition has been clearly designated as a pilot, meant to test the concept, format and regulations. The first full-fledged Tour season, culminating in the crowning of an official Total Chess World Champion, is slated for 2027. But even at the announcement stage, comparisons with Freestyle Chess were unavoidable, especially given that Freestyle Chess ran its own Grand Slam last year using a tour-style format.
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Jan Henric Buettner, co-founder and CEO of Freestyle Chess, is candid about how deceptively simple such ideas appear from the outside.“When I heard about it, I thought, okay, it’s interesting,” Buettner told TimesofIndia.com from South Africa during an exclusive interaction. “But in the end, it’s much more difficult than it looks from the outset to start a tour. I can really say that from my own experience.”Buettner believes that while the Total Chess Tour announcement made waves, execution is where the real test lies. “Especially when you want to put out prize money in that range, and you want to be on four continents and so on,” he said. “In their public communication, it feels a little bit like a copy and paste of what we have done, from prize funding, going around the world, and so on.”That perception has also spilled onto social media, where players and fans have reacted with a mix of curiosity and confusion.
Buettner referenced Indian grandmaster Vidit Gujrathi’s light-hearted video poking fun at the growing maze of formats and World Championship titles. “It’s so complex,” Buettner said. “There’s a lot of confusion about how it is and so on.”Still, he stops short of dismissing the Total Chess Tour as mere imitation. “In the end, we wish them good luck,” he told this website. “Maybe it even opened FIDE up to say, ‘Okay, we can create more world championship titles.’”Significantly, Buettner also pointed out that, as of now, much about the Total Chess Tour remains undefined. “They’re talking about a pilot tournament, and then maybe they’re going to get a tour together with sponsors and so on. They just announced the players who have qualified, but we still don’t know the location, what exactly they’re doing.”Home advantage, he feels, could make an early difference. But major challenges lie outside those four walls.“Maybe they do it in Norway for the first time, and then it’s their home turf,” Buettner said. “But it’s a totally different thing to organise tournaments on other continents. I can surely tell that from experience: being in the US, in Africa, in Paris. Doing it at home or somewhere else is not the same.”Those words carry weight. TimesofIndia.com can confirm that Freestyle Chess was keen to host a Grand Slam leg in India last year, but the plan fell through due to a lack of interest from Indian sponsors.Yet Buettner is surprisingly open-minded about the future coexistence of formats. “After this new development, it might even be a good thing,” he said. “They can do their tour, and maybe the winner of their tour also has a qualification for the World Championship in Freestyle Chess. Why not? I’m open to anything.”Away from formats and formats wars, Buettner himself has been at the centre of speculation for the last few months. In June last year, TimesofIndia.com reported that he would step down as CEO of Freestyle Chess on July 1, transitioning to an Executive Chairman role while COO Thomas Harsch took over daily operations. That handover, however, did not materialise.“I’m not the person who leaves something that’s not in the right place,” Buettner clarified. “When we planned the transition, we were not anywhere near complete. So my plan now is to do this World Championship and then hand it over to somebody else, so we can present new leadership for season two.”Whether the Total Chess World Championship Tour can escape the copy-cat label, or whether the chess world will ultimately embrace parallel pathways, will only be decided once the clocks are started and the tours actually roll out.
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