2025 FCGST

Good thing this blog has never pretended to be a news blog. Last month's post, 2024 Champions Showdown (November 2024), was about an event that took place in October. This month's post is about an event in November:-

• 2024-11-22: Carlsen Wins Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Match Vs. Caruana After Surviving Game 2 (chess.com; NM AnthonyLevin) • 'The event, concluding a few days before the 2024 FIDE World Championship in Singapore, promoted the launch of the 2025 Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, a yearlong event that will feature the Chess960 variant.'

[Insert nitpicking here:] Why write 'Chess960' with an upper case 'C'? No one does that for 'chess', which is much better known. On top of that, as I never get tired of saying, chess960 isn't a variant of chess; it's an evolution. The traditional start position (SP518 RNBQKBNR) is chess960 limited to a single position of the 960 available. It took a larger-than-life Bobby Fischer to figure that out.

The Chess.com article included an overview of the tour's dates and venues, reproduced below. I suppose that 'NY, USA' means 'NYC', but maybe it means Albany, the capital of the state (or maybe Buffalo or Schenectady). We should know for certain in a few months.

A year ago, in Sayonara? (December 2023), I wrote,

I'm going back into hibernation, although I won't rule out an occasional post if I have something to say about a subject. Bye for now!

As it turns out, I managed 12 posts this past year, an average of one per month. What will 2025 bring? Maybe more of the same, maybe less. Who knows? If nothing else, I'll be back in a year to survey the scene.