Casablanca Chess, a new exciting twist: Viswanathan Anand

Adding to the growing popularity of chess, the Casablanca Stock Exchange threw a new variant in the hat. They're calling it 'Casablanca Chess' and the opening edition featured Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Viswanathan Anand and Amin Bassem.

What is Casablanca Chess?

At the outset, the games did not begin in a conventional manner. Instead, the starting positions in every game were inspired by historical world championships game and began with positions that gave each player an equal advantage.

Each player was handed the scoresheets of a chosen position at the beginning of each round.

Thereafter, for two minutes, they played through the historical game up to a certain position from where they began competing after the arbiter started the clock to a time control of 15-minutres, with a 10-second increment.

From that point onwards, the players played to win, with no draws allowed.

But why the chop and change?

"The goal is to break away from the well-trodden path and offer new horizons to players," wrote GM Hicham Hamdouchi and GM Laurent Fressinet, for Chessbase India.

And this has been done in the past as well with the Buenos Aires or Najdorf variation, the No Castling in Dortmund (where castling is prohibited), Bobby Fischer's Chess960, Anti Chess and Crazy House.

More recently, Carlsen won the experimental Weissenhaus tournament in Germany.

"The main idea is to have exciting games or, at the very least, encourage the participants to produce them," the GMs added in this blog post. 

'It's fun'

"Yes, I'm excited," said Viswanathan Anand in an interview with Chessbase India.

"I've done this in connection with solving (before). Somebody gives you a position and you're supposed to say this game and that. Its a new twist, in that we're supposed to continue from that point. Anything new like this, playing with history and culture will be fun," the five-time world champion added.

Magnus Carlsen went on to win the Casablanca Chess Variant Tournament on Sunday.

The Norwegian World No. 1 finished with 4.5 points from six rounds and on top of the four-players tournament.

Viswanathan Anand, meanwhile, scored three points to finish third.

The final day featured positions from classical World championship matches between Alexander Alekhine and Max Euwe (1935), Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov (1887) and Anna Ushenina and Hou Yifan (2013).