Chess 960 Yearbook 2025

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The Chess 960 Yearbook 2025 is the first and so far only chess book that

• provides a comprehensive and detailed overview of the history of this modern chess variant from the 1990s to 2025,

• presents over 150 grandmaster games using common chess symbols, based on interactive Stockfish analyses (Weissenhaus, Biel, Saint Louis, Singapore),

• discusses the problem of unbalanced starting positions,

• provides a tabular overview of the four best move sequences for White according to Stockfish for all 960 starting positions,

• statistically shows structural features based on Stockfish analyses

• and contains various indices, sorted by game numbers, starting positions and player names (White/Black).

The Chess 960 Yearbook 2025 is a pilot project that will be continued periodically in the future to present the current major events of the past year, supplemented by changing thematic contributions.

What should you know about Chess 960?

Chess 960 is the common technical term for an increasingly popular chess variant in which the starting position of the pieces behind the pawn chain is drawn variably. Together with the standard position, there are 960 set-ups possible in such a way that the same rules can be applied as usual, whereby castling must be possible on both sides in principle, but in most cases the king and rooks castle from starting squares other than e1/e8 or a1/a8 and h1/h8.

The World Chess Federation FIDE incorporated this chess variant into its rules in 2008 under the name Fischer Random Chess (FRC) and organised official world championships in 2019 and 2021. Bobby Fischer's idea of freeing classical competitive chess from excessive opening theory, so that more creativity and less memorisation can be reintroduced into the game from the very first move, is particularly popular with players at the higher levels because it takes away the pressure of opening preparation.

In 2024, the first highly lucrative elite tournament, the Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T. Challenge with Magnus Carlsen, took place at the luxurious Weissenhaus private resort in northern Germany and attracted a great deal of media attention. The success encouraged the initiator and private entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner to organise a Freestyle Chess Grandslam in 2025 with stops in Weissenhaus, Paris, New York, Delhi and Cape Town.

Chess 960 championships are also on the rise at local and regional level and it seems only a matter of time until the chess variant establishes itself permanently with its own rating system.