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„Freestyle Chess“ aka Buettner on the warpath: some deep insights

It's all about money, as usual. FIDE, for decades, was unable to find sustainable sponsorship and relies mainly on fees from event organisers e.g. $1.1 million for the Ding-Gukesh world championship alone. They utterly failed to monetize online chess and lost that arena to cheeseco and lichess. They are understandably afraid of anyone creating a 'world championship' outside FIDE but might begrudgingly accept it if the price is right.
On the one side, we have an aging world #1 who's increasingly displeased with FIDE and prefers his own platforms while avoiding the quality of classical chess. He answers to no one, and apparently thinks it is fine to play in a tournament where he considers all the arbiters and organisers incompetent idiots. On the other side, we have a FIDE president who despite superpowers has to sleep and do other stuff and cannot be contacted 24/7. Sometimes, he seems to be making decisions without consultation and sometimes other officials are doing the same and sometimes they contradict each other. The genial Sir Anand, now that he is VP, is forced to toe the party line and defend FIDE.
FIDE sees its power eroding and is thrashing about like a beached whale. The last time this happened, with Kasparov, we ended up with two organizations and two world championships running in parallel. A similar thing has already happened now - in reality, the vast majority of chessplayers are online and have no interest in FIDE or being represented by them.
If you don't want to translate from German in the above link, some of this was also reported on chessbase -
en.chessbase.com/post/open-letter-buettner-dvorkovich
Keep in mind the media coverage is slanted and we're mainly hearing from the Freestyle people and not FIDE.
This is all really sad. They are destroying the age-old game of chess just for economic reasons. Shameless people
I am not a particular good friend of the FIDE but bootlicking the best players without caring for the base is no solution either.

Fun fact: there is an open case in good ol‘ Germany what the name concerns. An individual patented ‚Freestyle Chess‘ some years ago. A symbiosis of human + computer matches was the idea.
@Sarg0n said in #5:
> From the same author, more or less IMHO.
>
> Buettner and his goat have overplayed their cards.
>
> chessecosystem.com/2025/02/06/fide-gegen-freestyle-zwei-verlieren-einer-mehr/

At the end of the article, the author mentions the Indian dominance and how their views will be important.
Indian chess speaks for itself! If you look at live ratings, there is only one Indian rapid >2700, Erigaisi at #18. In blitz, they have three players - #14 Anand, #15 Erigaisi, #19 Praggnananhaa. Yes, they play in these formats but clearly prioritise classical. They understand it has the highest quality and produce exciting uncompromising chess. No complaints about too much theory or too many draws like the old men say. In the same way, I feel the Indians will not take Fischer random (let's call it by its proper name rather than freestyle as an old man prefers so he doesn't need acknowledge his great predecessor) seriously. Sure, fun to play if the appearance fee/prize money is good but not a serious contender to classical and they will pick FIDE if it comes to a fight.
Today (February 7) is the start of this controversial tournament series in which Buettner hands out his money to the saturated top players.

I'm really excited to see what this guy has come up with this year to make the players look ridiculous.

Last year they had to compete in different colored jackets that made them look like canaries.
Are there 960 bots to play on lichess? I can't even find live boards to jump right in?