Freestyle Chess, Does it deliver?
Recap on Freestyle Weissenhaus Statistically
The first event of freestyle chess has just ended, with German GM Vincent Keymer defending homeland in possibly the hardest runout to date. The event is inarguably a success, but does it deliver? Does it make top level chess more exciting? Let's take a brief look.
Winrate
| Weissenhaus Classical | Weissenhaus Rapid | Tata Steel | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decisive rate | 53.8% | 62.2% | 39.6% |
26 games of classical time control is played between players. 7 games are won by white, 7 games are won by black, with 12 draws, a decisive rate of 53.8%. How does it compare to classical chess?
Let's take a look by comparison to our last classical event with a similar strength level: Tata Steel 2025, 91 games are played, with a result of 22 white wins, 14 black wins and 55 draws, with decisive rate of 39.6%.
What if we takes rapid chess also into consideration? 45 games of rapid chess has been played in Weissenhaus, 28 games are decisive and 17 games are drawn, with a decisive rate of 62.2%.
Arguably, freestyle chess is about 14% more decisive at top level in classical time control. And an additional 10% more decisive in rapid time control. There are also many drawn games, in which one side has a significant advantage (+3) but failed to convert (Nakamura - Sindarov, Sindarov - Caruana for example).
Viewership
We can do a similar comparison on viewership between these two events. Peak viewership for Weissenhaus on chess24's youtube channel is ~260k (Day 1), ~254k (Day 6), other days ranging from anywhere of 110k (Day7) to 200k.
Peak viewership of Tatasteel on the same channel is around 442k (Final day), other days ranging from 200k (Day 3) to 400k.
Most viewed event last year was inarguably the WCC Finals, Game 14 has a viewership of 1.5M.
We also doesn't see a huge peak for recap videos, Most video recaps received ~300k viewership on Gothamchess channel, this is not an improvements to Tata steel recaps, or Road to GM series, even when Magnus is actually playing the event.
The livestream results is not so good, mainly can be contributed to two factors:
1. The in-convenient timezone, with most matches happening 3 - 6 a.m. The event lost many viewership in America, the most viewed day is Day 6, which is also the longest day, where the last games finished 11:30 on west coast US.
2. The fan base. This is maybe a bigger issue, freestyle chess is clearly not an isolate fan base, but rather a sub-category of chess fans. The format difference is simply not attracting new viewers, but rather filters a portion of existing users.
Thoughts and future
Freestyle chess can definitely be an exciting format. More decisive, and more fair to some extent (We didn't see a significant winrate advantage for white). I would love to see more freestyle event in the future, in addition to rapid, blitz, classical tournaments, this is definitely a win for an average chess fan.
A large problem to sell freestyle chess (classical) is the opening phrase, where some players take 20 - 30 minutes in the first few moves. (20 minutes for Keymer on move 1 final day!) This is barely what we are looking for. Potentially, a time control of 25/d5 or 30+5, USCF style, could be an improvement to the viewers, or purely Rapid (10 + 10 or 15 + 10) with more games.