FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship Heats Up On Chess.com
The first officially recognized live and online Fischer Random Chess Championship is heating up this summer as the world's best players hope to advance on Chess.com through to the in-person conclusion of the tournament in Norway.
The Fischer Random Chess Championship is recognized by FIDE, the international chess federation, and is hosted by Dund AS in partnership with Chess.com.
The championship seeks to crown the best Fischer Random (also known as Chess960) player in the world. All games will be played in the popular chess variant with shuffled starting positions, first promoted by the former world chess champion Bobby Fischer.
With an open qualification process that began in April, the FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship now moves to tougher elimination phases as it plays down to the final nine players who will finish the tournament over the board in Norway.
A pair of play-in tournaments will be hosted on Chess.com this Sunday, Aug. 4, for titled players looking for a last chance to qualify for the next phase, the knockout rounds. You can watch coverage of the play-in tournaments at 7 a.m. and 12 p.m. Pacific, Aug. 4 on Twitch.tv/chess, with commentary by national master James Canty.
Next, the Fischer Random action speeds up even more as the first knockout bracket begins on Sunday, Aug. 11. The tournament is the first of six consecutive weekly knockouts with identical formats of 16 players each, including two invited top-grandmaster players per bracket.
So far, the following top Fischer Random grandmasters are confirmed to participate as invited players in the six knockout tournaments:
- Wesley So
- Peter Svidler
- Alexander Grischuk
- Ian Nepomniachtchi
- Alireza Firouzja
- Parham Maghsoodloo
- Sergey Karjakin
- Frode Urkedal
- Vidit Gujrathi
Three more of the world's top grandmasters will be added to the later knockout tournaments, which continue weekly from Aug. 11 to Sept. 15.
You can watch all knockout tournament coverage live on Twitch.tv/chess with chess master commentary every Sunday beginning Aug. 11.
The six survivors of the knockout brackets will join Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana, who were seeded directly into the quarterfinals, already recognized as two of the strongest Fischer Random masters in the world.
For more in-depth information on the FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship, including all titled player qualifiers, visit the official Chess.com guide here.
For the official rules of the FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship, see this PDF.
Remember to watch all upcoming FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship coverage on Twitch.tv/Chess starting this Sunday, Aug. 4 and continuing throughout the knockout phase until Sept. 15.
