Samarkand, September 26: The FIDE Election and the Question of Who Really Holds the Chess Crown

In July 2026, in Madrid, Magnus Carlsen won a game and then announced he would not defend the classical world championship. No applause. No farewell. Just an empty chair beside the board, and a news line most fans scrolled past on their feeds. Four years later, in Samarkand, a candidate for president of the International Chess Federation stood up and promised to bring him back. Back then I was sitting in the stands, with no idea I would one day step onto the pitch through words. But one thing I learned early in this trade: when a great player leaves the board, the public argues about why he left, and skips the larger question — who built that arena, and what for. On September 26, at the FIDE General Assembly in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, member federations will vote for a new president. Three names sit on the ballot: Wadim Rosenstein, a German entrepreneur and chess promoter; Jan Henric Buettner, a German entrepreneur; and Timur Turlov, a Kazakh businessman. According to Reuters on September 18, none of them comes from the professional chess-administration machine. That chair is empty for a reason unrelated to chess. Arkady Dvorkovich stepped aside after being placed on a European Union sanctions list. A transfer of power driven by geopolitical pressure, not by a confidence vote. At 52, I have lived through enough transitions to recognize a pattern: when a leader leaves for reasons outside the sport, the organization rarely has a successor ready. And the preparation gap always gets filled with something more expensive than expected. This election carries two heavy files. One is the Russia story. In June, FIDE temporarily suspended the Russian Chess Federation for failing to comply within the prescribed deadline with a Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling concerning the federation's incorporation of organizations from occupied Ukrainian territories. Rosenstein says plainly he will follow the CAS decision, that there is no way around it. The other file is conflict of interest — and Rosenstein himself put it on the table, proposing that FIDE employees not be permitted to work simultaneously for private chess organizations. That proposal sounds very clean. Until one remembers he is the founder and chairman of WR Chess, an organizer of elite chess events. Read only the headlines and you would think this election turns on a single question: who brings Magnus Carlsen back. The real game lies elsewhere. Chess is carrying a format paradox. The classical format — long time controls, deep opening preparation, high draw rates, a slow media cycle — still holds the highest symbolic status. At the same time, faster formats are winning attention: blitz, rapid, online tours, and above all Freestyle, a Chess960-style variant with randomized starting positions. With Freestyle, the story is different altogether. It strikes directly at what elite players have spent years building: opening databases. When starting positions are randomized, the value of thousands of hours of opening memorization collapses, and the skill axis shifts toward raw calculation and adaptability. That is why Carlsen finds Freestyle attractive. It is also why FIDE finds it worrying. Structurally, something stands out: all three candidates are businessmen, none are career chess administrators. That signals commercial capital flowing into the governance layer of a game of the mind. When assets and decision-making power sit in the same hands, the question of institutional independence becomes more urgent than ever. Among the candidates, Rosenstein describes himself as having the best relations with Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura. That is campaign positioning, not a verifiable data point. No document, no commitment from either player. Reuters reported a pledge, not a signature. And this is the most important technical point of the whole story: FIDE cannot compel a player to enter the championship cycle. It can only adjust qualification pathways, wild cards, or prize structures. The promise of bringing Carlsen back is, administratively speaking, not self-executing. It depends on incentive design, not on goodwill. Look at the ratings and the gap between those two names and the rest of the classical cycle says plenty. Carlsen holds a classical rating around 2830, with a published peak near 2882 in 2026. Nakamura sits around 2790 to 2800, peaking near 2816 in 2026. These figures are approximations and should be re-verified against the latest official data. The world No. 1 and No. 2 stand outside, or at the edge of, the classical cycle. Meanwhile the road to the crown continues without them. Based on my experience following matches, this kind of separation rarely lasts without consequences: the line between who is best and who holds the belt keeps widening. The best player does not need the belt to be recognized. The belt keeps losing its reason to exist if the best player cannot be bothered to contest it. Commercially, the power is asymmetric. FIDE needs Carlsen more than Carlsen needs FIDE. A world championship missing its most recognizable face loses substantial media value. That explains why the pledge climbed onto front pages, and why it remains so vague. There is another gap, acknowledged by the candidate himself: chess has enormous global awareness but very few sponsors. This is the clearest economic weakness any president must face, and it predates this election. Here I want to say plainly something analysts rarely say. Rosenstein's communications strategy is betting on something he does not control: the decision of a Norwegian player. A campaign built on a non-self-executing pledge makes itself a hostage. If Carlsen returns, the candidate wins big on image. If he does not, the gap between promise and reality will erode the credibility of the new leadership — whoever that is. More ironically, the verifiable commitments receive far less media oxygen. Conflict-of-interest rules, CAS compliance, a commercialization roadmap — these can be measured, tracked, questioned. But they do not generate headlines. A promise about Carlsen does. As someone who has followed women's chess since the late 1990s, I see another point rarely raised in this election: women's chess remains the most undervalued asset in the entire ecosystem. When candidates talk about market expansion and commercialization, the question I want to hear is not who they will invite, but which tier they will invest in. Women's chess does not lack talent. It lacks resources and deliberately allocated attention. Strategy is like people: you must know who you are before you want to become someone else. An organization that commits to commercialization without defining its core asset and its growth tier will repeat the same old loop under a new name. This election did not create chess's identity crisis. It merely exposed what had been cracking for a long time. There is one thing I always check before concluding anything about an internal battle in sport: who controls the calendar. Whoever controls the calendar defines what matters. FIDE currently holds the classical calendar and the power to approve the rules of play. But platforms and private organizers are gradually controlling the calendar of the fastest-growing formats. When one side holds the ritual and the other holds the audience, power flows toward the audience. That is why the vote in Samarkand matters far beyond one person's story. The result will shape the structure of the championship cycle for years, and determine how the Russia file is handled legally. Both are long-term decisions that no press release can fix. And there is a risk few are counting: if businessmen who already own private chess assets simultaneously hold FIDE's executive power, the line between governing and competing becomes very thin. The proposed ban on FIDE staff working for private organizers is strong on paper. But it raises a self-application question: if the person proposing it also chairs an event-organizing entity, how far will the rule really reach? The format debate carries a similar question. Defending the classical title's supreme status is an argument about prestige, not about competitive strength. Nobody argues that classical chess is more competitive — only that it is the most prestigious title. That distinction is subtle but has a large practical consequence: it lets the organization keep its old structure while new formats steadily take the attention share. For the Vietnamese chess market, where young players are gradually breaking into international events, the decisions in Samarkand are not distant matters. Qualification structures, entry rights, and the allocation of playing slots are all decided by the FIDE apparatus. A change at the leadership level can open or close the door for an entire generation of players. September 26 in Samarkand opens more than it closes. The true value of a move only becomes visible in the position that follows — when people know who really controls the calendar, who really controls the story, and who really enters the next cycle. Signing a contract is a matter of black and white on paper, but staying is a matter of the heart.