Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Magnus Carlsen has a vision to transform the ancient game of chess. The grandmaster, a contender to be the greatest player in history, is convinced that a revamped version complete with heart rate monitors and “confession” booths can win over new fans as well as devotees, insisting there is “massive untapped potential”.The Norwegian, the world’s highest-rated chess player, has joined forces with German technology investor Jan Buettner and New York-based Left Lane Capital to launch a league that takes inspiration from sports such as Formula 1 motor racing.He and fellow competitors in the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour will compete under a version of the game that randomises the starting position of the kings, queens, bishops, knights and rooks so as to prioritise creativity and intelligence over memorised lines of play.“We inherently believe this is a better game than what we’ve been playing in classical chess,” Carlsen told the Financial Times. “A lot of people who are in gaming feel that having a new map for every game is tremendously exciting.”The heart rate monitors will reveal the stress levels endured by players, while confession booth-style interviews will follow a similar format to those used in reality television shows.The competition, which gets under way at Buettner’s German estate in February before moving on to Paris, New York, Delhi and Cape Town, is a play for a global online chess audience that has boomed since the pandemic. The profile of chess was raised by the success of The Queen’s Gambit, a Netflix series released in 2020 that tells the story of a fictional female prodigy.Left Lane has invested $12mn, an example of how investors are trying to bring new business models and competition formats to sport in search of returns.“You obviously have the GOAT [greatest of all time] in Magnus, which is a magnet for the best players in the world,” said Harley Miller, a Left Lane managing partner. “When you have the best players in the world, it allows you to think about distribution and the audience from the outset.”Miller acknowledged that the league would not be “immediately profitable”, but that the aim was to increase revenues from sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality and hosting fees.To achieve this, Freestyle Chess are seeking to reimagine the board game as a “media event” along the lines of a F1 race or a professional basketball match, with the idea of building a season-long narrative for fans to follow, according to a presentation shared with the FT.Elevating the profile of the players is key to those ambitions. “What makes F1 so exciting is the context, the colour codes of the drivers, the back stories, the personal stories of these people,” Buettner said.Freestyle Chess will prioritise reaching viewers and not place itself behind a paywall for now, according to Buettner, although media rights deals could follow “when we have enough distribution”. Chess.com is its biggest distributor at present, he added. The prize fund for each of the first three events will be $750,000, subsequently rising to $1mn. Carlsen’s backing is significant because he is the highest-profile player in the sport. He sat out of this year’s classical world championship, organised by governing body Fide, a crown he held for 10 years until he relinquished it in 2023 after growing exasperated with the format. But he was in Singapore to promote Freestyle Chess before 18-year old Indian Gukesh Dommaraju took the world title. Dommaraju will join the new league.Carlsen picked up on the aim of the competition’s backers to “make the chess players into race car drivers”, saying it was “definitely something we want to lean into, to make it about something more than only the game”.First, he added, “we need to have a great product. Then we can build the culture around everything.”
