The semi-finals of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour 2025 concluded on 12 February 2025 and we’ve got our much-awaited finalists. To everyone’s surprise, it’s not the World Number 1 Magnus Carlsen or the World Champion Gukesh D.
The finalists of the tournament are 20-year-old Vincent Keymer who earlier defeated Magnus at the FIDE World Cup in 2023 and the outstanding Fabiano Caruana who defeated the World Champion Gukesh D. twice in the tournament.
Both will now face each other for the final round on 14 February 2025 and the winner will take $200,000 home.
Vincent has won three matches in the Round Robin stage while losing four and drawing two. He had one of the lowest scores after the stage though he made a comeback after he defeated Alireza in the quarterfinals in both rounds.
He secured himself a position in the semi-finals against World Number 1 Magnus Carlsen and beat him in Round 1 which took place on 12 February while drawing the match in Round 2 that happened on 13 February. This loss ended Magnus’ hope of getting the title and the prize money of $200,000.
He said after winning the match, “Of course playing a match against Magnus… I felt quite decent about my form or shape in general so I was hoping at the very least to give a very good fight, Playing Magnus you can’t really expect to win the match, so I was quite relaxed in that sense, just trying to play good chess and see what happens.”
He had already qualified for the second leg of the tour that is set to take place in Paris in April. Keymer’s win came in handy as he had already defeated Carlsen twice in this match. He’s also the third youngest to participate in the tournament after Gukesh D and Javokhir Sindarov being 18 and 19 respectively.
He’s set to face World Number 2 Fabiano Caruana on 14 February in the finals. Fabiano is famous for beating Gukesh D. twice in the semi-finals. He also had the third-highest score of six in the Round Robin Stage of the tournament with four wins, one of them being against Magnus. He drew four matches while only losing one to Hikaru Nakamura.
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While the win came in easy for Keymer, Fabiano on the other hand had to snatch the victory from Sindarov after there was a tie after the second match of the semi-finals. Their match went to Armageddon tiebreaker and it took six matches and nearly eight hours for Caruana to defeat Sindarov finally. The fest 10+10 tie-break game ended up in a draw but he managed to secure his place in the finals where he will now face Vincent Keymer.
While all of this was happening, Gukesh lost his last match to Hikaru Nakamura remaining winless in the entire tournament. However, he was applauded for being calm, and his heart rate was high even after losing yet another game.
The finals will take place on 14 February. The winner will take home $200,000 while the runner-up will get $140,000.
