2025 FCGST, Weissenhaus

In the previous post, 'What's in a Name?' (February 2025), I promised,

The next post will record the result of the Weissenhaus leg of the FCGST ['Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour'], which finished yesterday.

The tournament started with a two-day 10-player round robin that determined the pecking order for the six-day knockout event.

Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour (wikipedia.org)

There were two commenting streams, the 'Pro stream' and the 'Community stream'. Here are links to the 'Community stream' for each of the eight days.

• 2025-02-07: Day 1 Rapid RR • 'ft. Magnus, Hikaru & World Champ Gukesh!' (6:04:04; 557K views)
• 2025-02-08: Day 2 Rapid RR • 'Will Magnus, Hikaru Fight Back As Sindarov Leads?' (4:42:29; 285K views)
• 2025-02-09: Day 3 QF-1 • 'Magnus vs. Nodirbek & Gukesh vs. Fabiano Headline KO' (4:48:07; 354K views)
• 2025-02-10: Day 4 QF-2 • 'Will Alireza, Gukesh March A Comeback In QFs?' (6:27:58; 287K views)
• 2025-02-11: Day 5 SF-1 • 'Magnus vs. Vincent & Fabiano vs. Sindarov!' (4:52:54; 290K views)
• 2025-02-12: Day 6 SF-2 • 'Magnus vs. Vincent & Fabiano vs. Sindarov!' (7:49:51; 427K views)
• 2025-02-13: Day 7 F-1 • 'Fabiano vs. Vincent! Magnus vs. Sindarov For 3rd' (5:44:50; 259K views)
• 2025-02-14: Day 8 F-2 • 'Fabiano vs. Vincent! Magnus vs. Sindarov For 3rd' (6:26:24; 260K views)

The description of the first video in the list ('Day 1 Rapid RR') informed,

Freestyle Grand Slam Weissenhaus is the first leg of the 2025 Freestyle Chess Grand Slam tour and is a rapid round-robin and a classical knockout tournament.

Featuring some of the world's most legendary players: Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Gukesh Dommaraju, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Alireza Firouzja, Levon Aronian, Vincent Keymer, and Javokhir Sindarov.

A half-hour into the clip we see the method of choosing the start position.

'Bingo Balls'

'Rapid RR Day 1'

The start times in the clip for selecting the start position of each round are:-

(0:34:40) Rd 1
(1:34:40) Rd 2 - At first, the balls don't release.
(2:33:40) Rd 3
(3:34:40) Rd 4
(4:36:00) Rd 5

At some point we learn, 'Position doesn't go back in the bucket', meaning a position won't be repeated in a subsequent round. For last year's post on the event that kicked off the freestyle brand, see Carlsen Wins First Major Chess960 Event of 2024 (February 2024; esp. 'Nine Things We Learned - Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T. Challenge 2024'). Congratulations to the 2025 winner Vincent Keymer for what must be one of the most important tournament victories of his career.