15 February 2025

'What's in a Name?' - It's Back!

Last month's post A Freestyle Fight (January 2025; '2025 Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour' [FCGST]), demands two follow-ups:-
  1. The resolution of the 'fight'
  2. The results of the first leg of the FCGST, held in February at Weissenhaus, Germany

First let's have some consequent off-board news that has been lingering since late last year: Wikipedia changed the name of its main Chess960/FRC page from 'Fischer Random Chess' to 'Chess960'; see Talk:Chess960 - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org; 'Requested move 29 October 2024'), for the not-so-consequent discussion. I made a similar choice when I first started to investigate Fischer's idea, a choice that was reinforced a few years later:-

Unlike Wikipedia, I don't have the time to return to the decision every five years. Let's get back to FCGST, which has jumped across all three of my chess blogs. After 'Freestyle Fight' on this blog, the latest chess960 alias popped up on my main blog in World Championship Yahoos 2025 ('1/?'; January 2025). To summarize:-

Those 104 stories were supplemented by two additional pages: 'Magnus Carlsen on Freestyle chess controversy' with 25 stories [...] I'm covering the freestyle saga on my chess960 blog, because 'freestyle' is one of numerous aliases for chess960. [...] The dispute is about FIDE's claim to have the exclusive right to any 'World Chess Championship'.

Any reference to 'World Chess Championship' is automatically a candidate for discussion on my blog of the same name. So far there have been two posts:-

End of story? Maybe, maybe not. Here are the Chess.com reports providing background and comments to all of the above. All reports were signed 'TarjeiJS', i.e. Tarjei J. Svensen, Norwegian journalist and ally of GM Carlsen.

It's clear that Carlsen has an axe to grind with FIDE and has convinced a wealthy backer to support his cause. History tells us that in any dispute between a top player and FIDE, the court of public opinion favors the player. History also tells us that FIDE wins the off-court struggle.

That's enough of the politics. The next post will record the result of the Weissenhaus leg of the FCGST, which finished yesterday.