The ongoing dispute between Fide, the official world chess body, and Freestyle, which has enlisted the top 25 elite grandmasters in a $3.75mn Grand Slam, was kicked into the future last week after Freestyle, where the back rank piece formations are randomised, decided not to call its 2025 circuit a world championship.
However, relations remain icy. A meeting of Freestyle’s GM members resolved to revisit the naming issue at the end of the year, while its organiser Jan Henric Buettner announced the hiring of a legal team to support the players. The implication is that the battle is likely to resume in 2026 with rival world championships.
The world No 1 Magnus Carlsen, who is Buettner’s Freestyle partner, announced that he will cease to play Fide events due to his fractured relationship with its Russian president, Arkady Dvorkovich. This is bad news for Norway’s Olympiad team, which was seeded sixth in 2024 but, without its No 1, will be outsiders in 2026.
Meanwhile, the first leg of the Freestyle Tour, at Buettner’s luxury Weissenhaus resort in north Germany, has its semi-finals on Tuesday and Wednesday (noon GMT start). Carlsen meets Germany’s Vincent Keymer, while the US champion Fabiano Caruana takes on the surprise of the event, the 19-year-old qualifier Javokhir Sindarov.
The Uzbek knocked out the world No 2 Hikaru Nakamura 3-1 in his quarter-final. In contrast, India’s new world champion Gukesh Dommaraju, 18, has found Freestyle difficult, has so far only scored draws and losses, and will now compete for fifth place at best.
Stewart Reuben, who died on February 4 aged 85, was England’s outstanding chess organiser of the 20th century, and played a key role in the chess explosion of the 1970s.
Reuben’s special brainchild was the weekend Swiss tournament, where sophisticated pairing rules enabled large numbers to take part. The 1973 London congress, at the height of the Fischer boom, had around 2,000 entries, and the intense competition produced a battle-hardened young generation who, in the 1970s and 1980s, made England the No 2 chess nation after the Soviet Union.
Reuben organised and directed numerous major international tournaments, including the 1986 and 1993 world championships. The former, in London, overlapped with the BCF congress in Southampton, but Reuben was unperturbed, controlled both events, and even provided running commentaries on the play.
Fide, the global chess body, awarded him the titles of International Arbiter and International Organiser, while top players also appreciated Reuben’s skills. Hikaru Nakamura last week called him “one of the greats in chess who many have never heard of”, while Malcolm Pein, the ECF International Director, described him as “a life-long innovator, the most successful and influential organiser in English chess history”.
Reuben was always approachable and ready to give friendly advice, as well as being a lively raconteur with a stream of anecdotes. He was an expert player, who once drew with Bobby Fischer in a blitz game and halved with David Bronstein in a classical tournament, but he was even better at poker, where he was a very successful professional who also wrote several books.
Reuben held numerous key posts for the English and British Chess Federations and for the global body Fide, and was an authority on chess rules. In his final decade he became ECF Director of Senior Chess, where his teams and players won medals in world and European competition. A legend.
Puzzle 2611
Magnus Carlsen vs Javokhir Sindarov, Freestyle Qualifier, Weissenhaus 2025. Black to move and win.
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