The Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour 2025 - Paris concluded at the Pavillon Chesnaie du Roy in Paris on April 14. It involved a now-rare clash between the world's top two ranked players, GMs Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, in the Grand Final, with the former notching an ultimately straightforward 1.5:0.5 win.
Part of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, the Paris Grand Slam peaked at 139,801 viewers at the end of the first match of the finals. It was a thrilling yet brilliant win for Carlsen on Day 1, aided by a shrewd pawn sacrifice on move four and a major blunder by Nakamura just when it looked like he could salvage a draw from a challenging situation.
Freestyle chess, another name given to Chess960, sees the pieces on the back rank get randomized in the starting position. The pieces usually move the same way as normal chess in this variant of the game, but other aspects are changed. The main reason to play this format is to avoid opening theory and memorization, as the highly practised opening phase of matches gets thrown out the window by swapping the pieces around, meaning players are on their own from the very first move.
With his Paris triumph, the Norwegian World No 1 took home $200,000 out of a total prize pool of $680,000 and 25 Grand Prix points. These points will be accumulated across the five over-the-board events in the series and the participant with the highest score at the end of the year will emerge as the Freestyle Chess Champion.
Having finished third in the first competition of this Chess series in Weissenhaus, Carlsen brought his A game to France, winning the entire thing without going through a single tiebreak. It also put him atop the overall Freestyle Chess table, three points above Weissenhaus winner Vincent Keymer.
Two of the world's best players — and also two of the game's foremost content creators globally — facing off in the Grand Final of this Chess tournament helped the Paris edition do 23.9% better than the Weissenhaus iteration in terms of Peak Viewers (PV). However, the latter had a higher Hours Watched (HW) count as the matches were slightly longer in Germany.
This also meant that the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour 2025 - Paris ended as the year's second most popular chess competition. Both the Freestyle Chess editions are also among the top three events in the game this year by watch time, thanks to the classical format ensuring longer games
The other classification matches of the final day saw GM Fabiano Caruana pocket $100,000 and a spot in the Las Vegas Grand Slam after easing past GM Vincent Keymer 1.5:0.5 in the battle for third place. GM Arjun Erigaisi sneaked past a game GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave 1.5:0.5 to take fifth and $50,000, while GM Ian Nepomniachtchi had a more comfortable 2:0 win over GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov to finish seventh and become richer by $30,000.
There was also some vital news about the next event in the series to be held in mid-July, with the venue moved from New York to Las Vegas. Jan Henric Buettner, the man behind the Freestyle Chess tour, also revealed on the official broadcast of Freestyle Chess Tour that the third edition of the series will witness 45-minute games with a 10-second increment per move instead of the usual 90-minute games with 30-second increments.
This change to shorter games was made at the behest of former world champion Carlsen and his father, Henric Carlsen, as the series looks to attract more sponsors and improve viewership-wise. Buettner added that there will be a live audience in Las Vegas, and with the legendary Gary Kasparov mooted as being one of the invited players, fans could be in for a treat as they could see multiple generations collide in Sin City.
