Grenke Freestyle and Classical Opens 2026

[Christopher Kreuzer]

https://en.chessbase.com/post/grenke-fr ... en-2026-d4

This event (310 players in the Freestyle Open and 998 players in the Classical 'A-Open') is going into its final day. Seven rounds played. Two more of the nine rounds to go. Keymer leading the Freestyle by half a point on 7.5/9. Xiao, Hong and Horvath leading the classical event.

Question: although attention probably taken up by the ongoing Candidates Tournament, do people prefer to follow the Freestyle or Classical games at such tournaments? I must confess I don't really follow the Freestyle events, but maybe that is just me.

[Graham Borrowdale]

Personally, I have no interest whatsoever in freestyle, but then again I have been called a dinosaur on here on at least one occasion. What’s your excuse, Chris?

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Personally, I have no interest whatsoever in freestyle, but then again I have been called a dinosaur on here on at least one occasion. What’s your excuse, Chris?

I don't understand the Freestyle openings. I get the tactics later (and the endgames). But I find it easier to follow the openings in classical chess. I wonder sometimes if even some strong GMs have an aversion to Freestyle chess for that reason?

[Matt Mackenzie]

Tbh my main objection to "freestyle" is its hype merchants who incessantly proclaim it "the future of chess" and equally monotonously insist that the classical game is "played out" - a statement no more true now than on all the other occasions it has been claimed in the past century.

[Paul Heaton]

equally monotonously insist that the classical game is "played out" - a statement no more true now than on all the other occasions it has been claimed in the past century.

Logically this statement cannot be correct. There are only a finite number of games that can be played, so as time progresses you automatically tend towards the game being “played out”. Moving from theory to practice, the huge advance of the computer over the last twenty years (ie post Fischer talking about “the old chess being played out”) has made large sections of a chess game at the highest levels no longer playable (Pirc, Kings Indian etc). Who knows what developments in quantum computing will do in the next 20 years, and whether it may even solve the game- but it’s a given the advances in computing power over the next 2 decades will make the last 2 decades look like a rounding error.

Proof of the pudding is the big contraction in top level classical events over the last 20 years - in an era when travel has by and large never been easier- with the top players no longer finding interesting vs eg rapid.

Of course below the top level things are different, but I’ve never heard anyone say club chess is played out.

[Matt Mackenzie]

Not at all convinced by that in several ways. In particular, computers have still only scratched the surface of chess really - and I regard the chances of them "solving" the game in our lifetimes at least as close to negligible.