Samarkand, September 26: FIDE's Power Game and the Pledge to Bring Carlsen Back

In the hall in Samarkand there will be an empty chair. Arkady Dvorkovich is leaving the presidency of the International Chess Federation by a route no sports leader would ever choose: his name sits on the European Union sanctions list. On September 26, in Uzbekistan, member federations will vote for the person who takes that chair. Reuters, in a report dated September 18, names three candidates: Wadim Rosenstein, Jan Henric Buettner and Timur Turlov.

I read that report with a rapid game still playing in one earphone. The electronic clock ticked second by second. Rain fell steadily outside a window in Da Nang, and I realised I was hearing two things at once: a countdown, and a background tone. The biggest game in chess right now is being played off the board.

Dvorkovich departs without a single vote being cast against him. An administrative decision signed in Brussels pushed him out. For an organisation that governs world chess, a leader leaving the chair for reasons that lie outside the board is something rarely written into law, yet it is becoming precedent.

All three candidates are businessmen. Rosenstein is a German entrepreneur and chess tournament organiser. Buettner is also a German businessman. Turlov is Kazakh. None of them came up through the federations' administrative machinery. Private capital is knocking on FIDE's door, and knocking hard.

The year I left the newsroom after eighteen years, I thought I had been exiled from football; it turned out football took me deeper into myself. The lesson carried over to chess is simple: what decides the outcome often never appears in the minutes. In Samarkand the minutes will record the winner's name. They will not record who rewrote the rules before the ballots were handed out.

Rosenstein says that among the candidates he has the best relations with Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, and that he wants to bring Carlsen back into the classical world championship cycle. That is the campaign's selling point. It is also its least verifiable one.

Carlsen is a five-time classical world champion and holds the world number one spot at a rating of roughly 2830. Nakamura is number two, around 2790 to 2800. Both still compete at the highest level. Both have moved past the usual peak-age zone. And both have chosen a different path: rapid, blitz, online, and variant events with far greater commercial pull.

Nakamura deserves separate thought. He is world number two, but his value to the sport lies largely in his ability to draw streaming audiences. That kind of value is one a federation can neither create nor control. When a sport's fortunes depend on the choices of a handful of individuals, every long-term plan carries a human-shaped gap.

A chess game is not decided by the strongest piece on the board, but by whoever is allowed to place the pieces. FIDE cannot order a player into the candidates cycle. It can only adjust the qualification path, grant wild cards, or change the prize structure. The pledge to bring Carlsen back is not self-executing. It is an incentive-design problem, not a prestige problem.

The crux sits here: what Carlsen is chasing is not the glow of the classical crown, but a format that gives him more room to calculate and less dependence on a memorised opening database. Freestyle, in the Chess960 style, randomises starting positions and strips value from thousands of hours of opening preparation. For a player who spent two decades building his own data library, that shift is both a threat and an escape route.

Meanwhile, classical chess still holds first place on the symbolic plane. That position is being contested by the very pull of shorter, faster, more streamable formats. The election in Samarkand is therefore also a contest over the calendar: who gets to decide when, and under which format, a game deserves to be called important.

Based on my experience following matches, I see a familiar paradox. Classical chess draws its strength from being slow. Long time controls, deep openings, high draw rates, a sluggish media cycle. Two players can draw after four hours, and nobody watches to the end. But there can be no beautiful chess nights if the chess world has no nights left to stay awake for.

In Samarkand, the hardest file does not carry Carlsen's name. It carries Russia's. In June, FIDE temporarily suspended the Russian Chess Federation because it failed to comply, within the deadline, with a Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling concerning the incorporation of organisations from occupied Ukrainian territories. Rosenstein commits to following that ruling, saying there is no way around it. That is the clearest plank in his platform, because it is bound by law rather than personal choice.

Yet the same candidate carries another file. His WR Group holding previously ran logistics, certification and oil-and-gas projects in Russia, said to have been dropped after the 2026 sanctions. He is founder and chairman of WR Chess, an organiser of elite tournaments. He proposes that FIDE employees should not be permitted to work simultaneously for private chess organisations.

A conflict-of-interest rule is right in itself. What interests me is whom it applies to. If he becomes FIDE president, he is himself the head of a private chess organisation on the other side of the table. I am not saying he would abuse the office. I am saying a rule only has value when it binds the person who wrote it.

There is a pattern I have met many times in sport: claims that are easy to verify get little coverage, while claims that are hard to verify fill the front pages. In Samarkand, the promise about Carlsen is being mentioned far more than the commitments on conflict of interest, on CAS compliance, on commercialisation.

The candidate himself says chess has only a few sponsors, while global awareness is very high. That gap is the biggest business problem in the sport. It existed before any election, and it will exist after every election.

On September 26, one ballot will decide who runs world chess. What is really being voted on is the calendar, the formats, and the right to decide which game matters most this year.

I still keep the habit of recording pitch-side sound before I write, even though most of my writing now is about chess. That sound reminds me that a chess game, like a football match, only truly lives when someone outside is listening. The task of those sitting in the hall in Samarkand is to make sure that listening is not replaced by the counting of a cash register.