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Journalism of Courage
When Jan Henric Buettner, chess’s newest disruptor, was first asked by a German grandmaster a few years back if he had ever considered hosting a chess tournament at his luxury resort in Weissenhaus, he didn’t know what a chess tournament would look like.
When he watched his first chess event online shortly after that conversation, Buettner’s unfiltered thought about it was: “incredibly boring to watch two people play chess.”
A couple of years — and many million euros in investment later — Buettner is trying to make chess more interesting with freestyle chess, a variant of chess where the starting position of pieces on the back ranks are shuffled.
“Chess was a sport I had initially played when I was in elementary school. And then, I got back in touch with it just when I was turning 60 years old. Back when I was conceptualising freestyle chess, I was visiting a lot of Formula One races, paddock clubs and so on. I thought that what these guys did was something similarly boring. I mean, it’s also very boring to watch fast cars drive by with no context, right?” Buettner tells The Indian Express.
So the German set off on a quest: to challenge accepted norms, make an exciting version of the sport and create the best tournament possible.
The one person Buettner didn’t have to convince too much about freestyle being interesting is the man whose opinion carries considerable heft in chess circles: five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen.
The world No.1 helped Buettner conceptualise the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour after the duo first met in Qatar in October 2023. Just like Buettner, Carlsen too was looking for something different. He had already ‘completed chess’ with world championship titles in every format possible besides winning titles in every event worth winning.
Carlsen needed a new challenge. Buettner needed a reliable partner to help shape his new project.
“I needed the best chess player of all time (to help him build a new chess event). So I connected with Magnus. We met for a few days and there he told me that if he could basically design his own tournament, he would basically play Fischer Random 960 (another name for Freestyle Chess) on the highest level with the best chess players with classical thinking time,” he recalls.
When Carlsen mentioned Fischer Random 960, Buettner remembers thinking to himself: “Is this something that you get in the pharmacy for your cold?”
It wasn’t. But it did cause the German’s eyes to widen in excitement.
Fischer Random 960 was a format made popular by American Bobby Fischer decades ago. FIDE had tried to organise World Championships for it, but had abandoned the idea in 2022 after finding no commercial takers.
But Buettner saw promise in the sport. (So much promise that he’s tried to go to war with FIDE, the global governing body of chess, over his league.)
The term ‘Freestyle Chess’ was born because Buettner was certain that Fischer Random 960 was not really marketable.
After the pilot tournament at his luxury resort last year — which he says cost him around two million euros — Buettner and freestyle chess are back this year with a more ambitious five-tournament plan that takes the event out of Weissenhaus and to cities like New York, Paris and Cape Town.
Buettner says he’s a man who’s had a “lot of careers in his life”. He was “big in mobile communications and founded AOL Europe”. He also had a venture capital fund in California for 15 years.
Weissenhaus, the luxury resort where the first event was held last year and is currently hosting the first event of the 2025 Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour has a fascinating story as well. Buettner bought the 75 hectare private estate and the village in 2005. He claims he spent around 50 million euros to restore all the rundown buildings and make it into a luxury resort, which was completed in 2014. It operates as the Weissenhaus Private Nature Luxury Resort for most of the year. But once every year it will host the world’s best chess players for an event.
Initially, the idea was to host just one event. Then, came the year-long freestyle tour. And Buettner’s ambition for the freestyle variant is rising with each passing year.
“We also want to explore Africa, South America, Australia like the Formula One circuit does,” he says.
Over the past four days, the Weissenhaus event has seen some intense chess being played by some of the biggest names in sport. The one thing it has not been — as Buettner would say with relief — is boring.
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