Exploring Casablanca Chess 2024: A New Variant in the Chess World

Casablanca Chess 2024: A Tournament of Grandmasters and Historic Positions

Earlier this year, four top Grandmasters participated in an incredible tournament called Casablanca Chess 2024. Casablanca Chess is a variant where players are handed equal positions from the openings of old games. This variant led to a fascinating and competitive tournament. In this blog, we will be discussing this stunning new variant, its future, and who performed best in Casablanca Chess 2024.

Casablanca Chess Explained
In Casablanca Chess, the players are given a position from the opening of a historical chess game. Per usual, white moves first and black goes second. However, the game starts well into the opening of a previous game instead of in the regular starting position.

In Casablanca Chess 2024, the viewers were given a selection of positions and voted to choose which ones the players started with. Here are the rules for ensuring a position is valuable for Casablanca Chess:

– The position must be from somewhere between the 6th and 15th moves of a game.
– The computer evaluation of the position must be equal or very close to it.
– The position must offer “rich possibilities for both players”. Meaning, it should be a game that is balanced both from a human and from an evaluation bar perspective. Additionally, it should be a position where both players can try and push for a win.

Benefits of Casablanca Chess
Each chess variant has aspects that are wonderful and aspects that are simply trash. Below, I have listed several of the pros of Casablanca Chess:

– Variety: Chess can often feel like a redundant broken record. Instead of the same opening position each game, Casablanca Chess allows for new ones that arise from openings that were popular hundreds of years ago but may never be seen in the modern day. This lets players play out positions they have never seen before and will never see in normal chess.
– Less Prep Needed: In most modern-day chess games – especially at the master level – players memorize as many lines as possible and play them on the board. This leads to games often being more about memory and studying than creativity and strategy. Casablanca Chess allows for players to start the game with wildly unusual positions and stops them from starting off with memorized lines.
– Brings Back Positions From Historical Games: This variant rewards people with more knowledge of historical chess games, increases interest in chess matches from the past, and allows us to see previous chess games between masters be played out by the Grandmasters of today.

Casablanca Chess 2024
Casablanca Chess 2024 was a tournament hosted in Casablanca, Morocco in May of 2024. Four incredibly high-ranked Grandmasters played a total of 12 rapid games in this two-day event.

Players
As mentioned several times, there were four Grandmasters who participated in Casablanca Chess 2024: GM and GOAT of chess Magnus Carlsen, GM Hikaru Nakamura, GM Vishy Anand, and GM Bassem Amin.

This is simply a star-studded lineup. It includes two former world champions (Vishy and Magnus) and all the players in it have a FIDE classical Elo of well over 2600.

Results of Casablanca Chess 2024
After all six rounds of Casablanca Chess 2024, Magnus Carlsen emerged as the clear winner. He fought tooth and nail to earn 4.5/6. Meanwhile, Hikaru came second with a score of 3.5/6 and Vishy came third with a score of 3 for 6. Grandmaster Bassem Amin is a superb player with a FIDE elo of 2593 for rapid. However, he was only able to go 1/6 because he was going up against general talents like the GOAT Magnus Carlsen and former world champion Vishy Anand.

The Future of Casablanca Chess
@NM_Vanessa wrote an article about Casablanca Chess 2024 where she called it an “inaugural” event. Hopefully, that means there will be many more Casablanca Chess tournaments and this variant will outlive the year 2024. Unfortunately, nobody can know for sure.

One suggestion I would have for Chess.Com is to make Casablanca Chess an official, playable variant here on this site. There were a total of six different positions used in this tournament and they were all picked from pools of three historic and viable positions. If all these positions were put into a system and players could play Casablanca Chess and randomly be given one of them and either white or black, then that could be a great variant to play.

In conclusion, Casablanca Chess 2024 brought together top Grandmasters in a unique and challenging tournament. The variant offers a refreshing take on traditional chess and has the potential to become a popular format in the future. With the success of the inaugural event, it is hoped that Casablanca Chess will continue to grow and evolve in the world of competitive chess.