Jan Henric Buettner

Co-founder and CEO of the Freestyle Chess

“One day I told my friend, a grandmaster: ‘You know, if we make a chess tournament in Weissenhaus, I want Magnus Carlsen to be there’. And he said: ‘Okay, let me introduce you to him’. That’s how I met Magnus in October 2023.

We spent about five days with the Carlsen family. And then Magnus also understood and realized that I’m not an idiot talking nonsense, and that I can do this, implement the project. He essentially said: ‘Okay, if you run the tournament and I can choose, I would like to play Fischer Random chess, at the highest level against the best players in the world’.

At that point, I had no idea what Fischer Random chess was. When I heard it, I thought it was like a medicine or something you buy at the pharmacy for a cold, like ‘Fischer Random’. Very few people outside the chess world would make the connection between ‘Fischer Random’ and Bobby Fischer and so on. It would have been very difficult to link it.

But later Magnus explained to me how it works with shuffling the pieces on the back rank. So, we went into implementation mode and successfully ran the first tournament.”