German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner was supposed to get on a plane to India last week to draw up plans for the Freestyle Chess event scheduled in the country for November this year. Buettner together with world No. 1 Magnus Carlsen had – post the success of the inaugural chess960 event in Weisenhaus in February – announced the launch of a Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour that would run across five continents. India was supposed to be its first stop. Buettner was to visit the country last week to meet potential sponsors and decide on a venue for the scheduled November 10-17 event.
As it turned out, he had little choice but to cancel his India trip. “The only ones interested (in India) were those who wanted me to invest a couple of hundred thousand into their hotel. It’s good as part of the plan. But if it’s only that, then I’d rather host the next event again, in my resort (Weisenhaus, Germany),” Buettner told HT, “In the meantime, we are exploring opportunities in New York, and in Cape Town, South Africa. Bottom line, I would only do an event outside of my home turf (Germany) if somebody else, you know, shares the burden with me. I’m not going to go to another country and spend millions of dollars just to do an on-site event there. I have invested $2 million into this already, and I’m willing to keep investing but only if it makes sense. To go to India, just to be in India doesn’t make sense if there’s no real support from the local or regional investors.”
The inaugural edition of the Freestyle Chess GOAT challenge was won by Carlsen who is a co-collaborator. He seemed to have a serious interest in the format of the tournament– chess960 (Fischer Random) in classical time control. He expressed his wish to not play classical round-robin tournaments and skipped this year’s Tata Steel event in Wijk Aan Zee ahead of the Weisenhaus event. The five-time world champion also handpicked the rest of his competitors for the super-tournament –Levon Aronian, Nodirbek Abdusattarov, Alireza Firouzja, Ding Liren, Vincent Keymar, Fabiano Caruana and India’s D Gukesh. For the India leg, the likes of Hikaru Nakamura apart from Carlsen and a host of other top players, were expected to participate. It can seem like a missed opportunity.
Buettner said he’s in talks with possibly having the event in the US or Africa instead of India later this year and is in discussions with Netflix for a series on freestyle chess. “We are having lots of talks with people in America and Africa. If we get funding we’ll go ahead with an event this year. Maybe it will take a bit more time to have it in India. It might be good for next year,” he said, “We are looking to have a series similar to ‘Drive to Survive’, so Netflix too is likely to have a say about where we have the event. So it’s a lot of things right now.”
Buettner is looking for investors to chip in so he can take the event to other parts of the world. In the absence of such interest, the idea of the Freestyle Grand Slam Chess Tour might not work, he said. Instead, he’d prefer to host it at his Weisenhaus property once a year.
“I started this together with Magnus and we said we’d do this one event and see how it goes. Wesisenhaus went extremely well and then we got all excited and said we’ll do it again and it seemed like there was a lot of interest from other countries. But I kind of misunderstood it perhaps. The interest was from other parties for me spending my money over there. That’s not my interest. I’m turning 60 this year so I’m not looking for another business opportunity. I’m trying to get this going and I see who I can join forces with. If it’s just me putting up $2 million and there’s nobody else putting in $5-10 million, someone who has more business and corporate interest perhaps then I might be on the wrong track. I don’t care where we go – India, Africa, Columbia, anywhere, as long as it’s a joint effort. If nobody shows up, we’ll just run it as an annual event in Weisenhaus.”
