Wesley So, Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Hjorvar Steinn Gretarsson, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Matthias Blübaum, Vladimir Fedoseev, and Olympic Champion Nodirbek Abdusattorov will compete in the 2022 edition of the FIDE Fischer Random Chess Championship. The event will take place at the Berjaya Reykjavik Natura Hotel, Iceland, 25-30 October 2022.
Get ready for the Fischer Random: Replay TCEC FRC 5 / FRC 4 / FRC 3 / FRC 2 / and the first ever FRC 1 Stockfish vs AllieStein, as well as the 9LX Fischer Random 2022 won by Fabiano Caruana after playoff vs Firouzja
The Fischer Random Chess 2022 boasts a prize fund of 400 000 USD, with 150,000 USD for the winner. Live games will be daily on Chessdom.com. As in 2019, the final will be organized by Dund AS, a Norwegian shareholding company. Lichess qualifiers are organized with the support of Offerspill Sjakklubb, Charlotte Chess Center, and the North American Corporate Chess League.
Wesley So enters as defending Fischer Random World Champion
In 2019, FIDE officially recognized the World Fischer Random Chess Championship. In the final of the inaugural edition, held in Norway, American Grandmaster Wesley So defeated classical chess champion Magnus Carlsen. The two-year pandemic hiatus put the organization of many major chess events on halt, and we’re excited to announce the second edition of the Championship is taking place this year.
“I am so excited to be competing in Fischer Random again! And in Iceland! It couldn’t be more special than to compete in that particular place, defending my title against the best players in the world. To play in Reykjavik, fifty years after the match between Fischer and Spassky, gives it a historical perspective that cannot be matched,” commented Wesley So.
More about Fischer Random Chess
Fischer random chess, also known as Chess960 (often read in this context as ‘chess nine-sixty’ instead of ‘chess nine hundred sixty’), is a variation of the game of chess invented by the former world chess champion Bobby Fischer. Fischer announced this variation on June 19, 1996, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Fischer random chess employs the same board and pieces as classical chess, but the starting position of the pieces on the players’ home ranks is randomized, following certain rules. The random setup makes gaining an advantage through the memorization of openings impracticable; players instead must rely more on their skill and creativity over the board.
Randomizing the main pieces had long been known as shuffle chess, but Fischer random chess introduces new rules for the initial random setup, “preserving the dynamic nature of the game by retaining bishops of opposite colours for each player and the right to castle for both sides”. The result is 960 unique possible starting positions.
In 2008, FIDE added Chess960 to an appendix of the Laws of Chess. The first world championship officially sanctioned by FIDE, the FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship 2019, brought additional prominence to the variant.
