Samarkand, September 26: The Ballot That Decides Who Writes Chess's Rulebook

Samarkand, September 26: The Ballot That Decides Who Writes Chess's Rulebook

Autumn in Samarkand is the colour of fired clay. The blue tilework of the Registan shifts hue hour by hour, and on the other side of the city, a congress hall is being re-arranged. On September 26, at the General Assembly of the International Chess Federation, member federations will vote for a new president. I have sat through more than ten such assemblies — Baku, Tromsø, Chennai — and every time people walk into that room with the same strange bearing: like they are about to watch a game no one is allowed to touch.

This time, in Samarkand, there is a difference. That ballot will decide not only who takes the chair, but which format counts as the summit of the sport, which country is allowed back into competition, and whether the world's number one has any reason left to enter the championship cycle at all. For someone in my trade, that is a rare kind of story: it is not on the board, but it lies underneath it.

Who is filling the vacancy

The vacancy has a name. Arkady Dvorkovich left the post after being placed on a European Union sanctions list. What matters is how he left. This was not a term-limited handover, nor a defeat at the ballot. It was a departure forced by pressure from outside the sport, and anyone who has watched how sports bodies operate knows such transitions leave a fracture in continuity. Leadership loses institutional memory, the personal relationships with small federations, the habit of negotiation. None of that is written in the statutes.

Three names are filling the vacancy, and all three are businessmen. Wadim Rosenstein, a German entrepreneur and chess tournament organiser, founder and chairman of WR Chess. Jan Henric Buettner, also German, also from business, tied to the commercial chess ecosystem. Timur Turlov, a Kazakh businessman, entering the race on financial resources. None of them is a career chess administrator in the traditional sense — none grew up inside a federation apparatus, none spent twenty years chairing a technical commission.

That is the biggest change I can see, and it arrived very quietly. Fifteen years ago, to reach this chair you had to climb: team captain, international arbiter, executive committee member. Now the shorter path lies elsewhere — owning a tournament ecosystem, a media company, a sponsorship base. Chess is still poor. But it is no longer too poor for wealthy people not to care.

The anchor is not on the board

One pledge in Rosenstein's platform rises above the rest and instantly became a headline: he says he will seek to bring Magnus Carlsen back into the classical world championship cycle. He also assesses that he holds the best relations with Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura among the candidates.

I read that line three times. Covering sports elections teaches one habit: separate actionable promises from attractive ones. Pledges about formats, regulations and calendars are actionable. Pledges to bring a player back are attractive. And the crucial point: FIDE has no mechanism to compel a player into the championship cycle. No clause in the laws of chess allows a federation to summon an individual. A governing body can only adjust qualification pathways, wild cards, and the financial structure of events. All three of those doors have their own locks, and all three need wider consensus than one president's signature.

Carlsen still tops the classical list at roughly 2830. His published peak was 2882 in 2026. He is a five-time world champion. In 2026 he announced he would not defend the 2026 title, and since then has focused on other formats. Those are facts with dates attached. He has been outside the cycle for three years.

Nakamura, of the United States, stands second at roughly 2790 to 2800, with a published peak of 2816 in 2026. His position in this picture carries two meanings at once: a top-tier player, and a media asset. In much recent analysis of chess's economics, Nakamura's streaming value is sometimes placed alongside his over-the-board record. Distinguishing the two is not a small matter for people in the trade. Strength at the board and viewership are different currencies, with different exchange rates, and they do not always convert.

Format: the real game of this congress

If there is a single technical axis in this whole story — and I use the word technical cautiously — it is format. I have watched enough games to know format is not packaging. It is the deepest layer of the rules.

Classical chess has long time controls, deep preparation, high draw rates, and a slow media cycle. Its technical value lies in opening depth and endgame technique. A top classical player can spend six months on one opening system, and that investment is only preserved if the format allows long time controls. Freestyle, also known as Chess960, inverts that logic entirely: randomised starting positions, opening memory devalued, the skill axis shifting toward raw calculation and adaptability. For those who have poured years into opening databases, this is not a neutral format. It is a revaluation of assets.

Then come rapid, blitz and online events. Short, high-variance, with strong streaming dynamics. That is where younger audiences actually are. I once wrote that esports taught me youth is not in the muscles but in the reflexes of the heart — and in chess, that reflex is measured in blitz. A three-minute game can produce ten memorable moments while a six-hour classical game produces one. Media does not reward depth. Media rewards frequency.

And here is the point I want to state plainly: the claim that the classical crown must remain the premier title is an argument about prestige, not about competitive strength. FIDE is not saying classical is harder, or that the classical champion is stronger than a freestyle champion. It is saying that this is the most important title. Those are different sentences, and blending them is the fastest way to lose an audience that is increasingly sharp and increasingly impatient with vague reasoning.

The legal file: Russia, CAS, and a suspended signature

In June this year, FIDE temporarily suspended the Russian Chess Federation after it failed, within the prescribed deadline, to comply with a Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling. That ruling concerned the federation's incorporation of chess organisations from occupied Ukrainian territories. These are sourced facts with dates and clear legal consequences.

In his platform, Rosenstein commits to following the CAS decision, arguing there is no other way. Analytically, this is the strongest plank of his entire platform precisely because it leaves the least room for discretion. It is tethered to an external ruling. It cannot excite an audience, it cannot generate a compelling headline, but it is determinate. In a platform that is otherwise vague, determinacy has its own value.

But that determinacy only holds on paper until people ask about the candidate himself.

Rosenstein has faced campaign questions over his business links to Russia. WR Group previously had logistics, certification and oil-and-gas projects in Russia, reported to have been dropped after the 2026 sanctions. He is also founder and chairman of WR Chess, an organiser of elite chess events.

I sat with this detail for a long time. On one hand, a European businessman's Russian business history in the previous decade is not unusual. Many European firms did the same. On the other hand, the only independent candidate in the race carrying both a Russia-linked business history and a chairmanship of a commercial chess tournament organisation is not a neutral detail. It is a structure.

And that is when I remembered this line: the transfer market is where people sell the future to buy hope. No player is being transferred here. But something similar is being traded: the right to shape the calendar, the right to negotiate rights, the right to decide which format counts as legitimate. Those cannot be bought with cash, but they can be bought with being present in the right room at the right time.

The paradox of a conflict-of-interest clause

The proposal that caught my attention most in Rosenstein's platform is a technical one, far less noticed than the Carlsen headline: FIDE employees should not be permitted to work simultaneously for private chess organisations.

It is a good proposal. It is clear, checkable, and goes straight at a real gap in sports governance. That gap has a name: rule-makers and event organisers are sometimes the same person, or sit in the same room, or share the same sponsor. In chess, where money is scarce, this overlap was once considered necessary flexibility for survival. It is no longer seen that way.

But there is a self-application question I have not seen answered. If the rule is that FIDE employees cannot simultaneously work for private chess organisations, where does a FIDE president who is also founder and chairman of a private chess event organiser sit under that rule? The candidate is himself a boundary case of his own proposal. That is not an accusation. It is a logic exercise, and a good platform must survive the exercise.

I think about this differently. Reform commitments are usually judged by how much they disadvantage the person making them. If a conflict-of-interest rule is written tightly enough to bind the proposer's own hands, it is real reform. If it stops at the staff level and never touches leadership, it is damage control. The two look identical on paper and are entirely different in practice.

The strange position of the number one

There is something I have observed over years of writing about sport that few say out loud: the power of a governing body is inversely proportional to the number of stars it cannot replace. FIFA survives Messi's retirement, because football has ten thousand stars. FIDE does not have ten thousand stars. FIDE has one.

Carlsen is number one at roughly 2830. Nakamura is number two at roughly 2790 to 2800. Both sit outside or at the edge of the classical cycle. Meanwhile the championship path continues without them. There is a reigning classical world champion, and he keeps playing, defending the title, respecting the cycle. But the commercial story of chess still clings to two names who are not taking part.

That is a genuine paradox with economic consequences. The number one holds asymmetric leverage over the body that governs his sport. Carlsen needs FIDE less than FIDE needs Carlsen, because the media value of the classical title falls when the sport's most recognisable figure is absent. This is not a judgement about anyone's worth. It is the arithmetic of attention.

That is why I read the pledge to bring Carlsen back as an addressed invitation, sent not only to fans but to Carlsen himself. It is a negotiating signal written in the language of a news item.

A land without a ball

When the stadium no longer holds a ball, memory begins to score. I wrote that during the pandemic, when the stands in Saint Petersburg were empty and my newsroom was hollow. My series back then opened with the 2026 European Championship final, when the Soviet Union beat Yugoslavia 2-1 through Viktor Ponedelnik's 113th-minute goal before 105,000 people in Paris. I told that match as if it had happened yesterday, and I realised memory is the only thing a pandemic cannot postpone.

I thought about that reading the three platforms. All three promise a future. None spends much space on what this sport has been through, and how it survived. That is a bigger gap than it looks. Chess has the thickest memory layer of any sport — its database is digitised memory, and every strong player lives on someone else's memory. An organisation that wants to lead this sport without talking about memory is ignoring its own largest asset.

I do not say this out of nostalgia. I say it because there is an operational lesson inside. New formats do not erase old memory; they reuse it at a different speed. A blitz event is more entertaining when the audience knows the person playing has been world champion three times. Format and history resonate with each other, and anyone trying to separate them is damaging the very business model they want to build.

The first thing I do not believe

Now the part many in the trade would rather not hear.

The pledge to bring Carlsen back is the loudest and least verifiable category in this entire race. It is a candidate's intention, not a player's commitment. No mechanism has been published. No wild-card clause, no qualification amendment, no financial roadmap. In my writing life I have learned one principle: when a promise comes without a mechanism design, it is a message, not a plan.

This does not mean the candidate is lying. People can sincerely want something and still not know how to reach it. But readers need a filter, and the filter is simple: count the executable steps. The CAS commitment has one step — accept the ruling and enforce it. The conflict-of-interest rule has several — draft, pass, monitor. How many steps does bringing Carlsen back have? Nobody has said. And what nobody has said is usually what nobody has designed.

There is a derivative risk I consider more serious than the promise simply failing. If the candidate wins and Carlsen still does not return to the classical cycle — entirely possible, and beyond any president's control — the gap between promise and reality will create a media debt. The new leadership will pay that debt in time and credibility, while the commitments that actually matter need exactly those two things to be implemented.

The second thing I do not believe

Sponsors. The candidate himself acknowledges chess has only a few sponsors inside the sport. I believe he is right, and this is the most credible observation in the entire platform.

Chess has one of the highest global awareness levels of any sport. Hundreds of millions know the rules. Tens of millions play regularly. Yet the number of international brands attached to a top-level chess event can be counted on one hand. The gap between awareness and sponsorship is the sport's greatest paradox. It is not a new problem. It predates this election and will outlast it.

I have wondered why the paradox is so durable. The answer lies in product structure. Elite chess is very hard to sell to mass sponsors: it is long, it is abstract, it has no physical collision, and it does not cut easily into short clips. Every time a new format appears and lowers those barriers, it becomes a more attractive candidate for sponsor money. This is an economic reason, not an aesthetic one, why the format debate cannot end with a declaration about tradition.

And that is why I think the commercial section of the platform, however unglamorous, is the most valuable part.

Outsiders, money in, rules changed

Three businessman candidates are not a random detail. They signal a structural shift in the relationship between capital and chess. For two decades, money entered chess mainly through the state, through local oligarchs, or through a few state corporations. Now it enters through companies founded by people who love chess, and those people want to do business and make rules at the same time.

I do not think this is inherently bad. Chess benefits when resourced people care about it. But there is a thin line, and the line is: the person organising the event should not be the person writing the event's regulations. In the past, that line was protected by the separation between a poor administrative apparatus and a business class that did not much care. Now that separation has vanished, and no mechanism has replaced it.

A personal investigation in words

I set myself a small exercise this week. I took the three platforms, underlined every sentence containing a concrete action verb, and counted.

The platform on Russia and CAS has many concrete actions. Comply, enforce, notify, restore or maintain suspension. The platform on conflict of interest has concrete actions. Draft, apply, monitor. The platform on bringing Carlsen back has almost no action verbs at the operational level. It has verbs of will: want, hope, aim.

I think this tally is a better tool than any polling we do not have. It is a small conclusion and I do not intend to inflate it. But it matches my professional instinct after years of watching sports ballots: people vote for a story, then get governed by a mechanism.

The blind spot of collective memory

There is something most fans will skip when reading this news, and I think it is the most important thing.

The sport's attention is fixed on whether Carlsen returns. But the survival question is who controls the calendar over the next decade. The calendar is the real instrument of power. Whoever controls the calendar controls what players earn a living from, how much, and at what point in the year. Online platforms have built parallel calendars with high appeal. Private organisers have created tournament series attractive enough to pull elite players out of the official cycle for weeks at a time. Nobody fights on the board. They fight on the calendar.

Chess's collective memory is somewhere else entirely. It is in the classic games, in the matches of the century, in the list of champions. Nobody remembers a resolution about scheduling that changed a generation's careers.

This is the classic blind spot: we remember the games, but we are governed by the schedules. If the September 26 election in Samarkand leads FIDE to consolidate its control over the calendar, fans will not see it in a headline. They will see it three years later, when a top player is missing from a tournament they were looking forward to, and they will blame the player.

The risk is not on the board

Three pressures are acting on FIDE at once right now.

First, a leadership transition forced from outside. When the person leaving does so not because of a lost vote but because of a sanctions list, the body loses the full legitimacy of the handover.

Second, an unclosed legal file: Russia, CAS, and the question of organisations from occupied territories. This is a file where FIDE is bound by an external ruling, so whoever wins has only a very narrow margin of discretion.

Third, a form of risk rarely seen at leadership level: the candidate himself is a boundary case of the standards he proposes. Corporate nationality, investment history, an ownership position in the tournament ecosystem — those three form a combination the conflict-of-interest platform is obliged to address.

One at a time, they are manageable. All three at once, around a single ballot, produce systemic exposure greater than their arithmetic sum.

I once wrote about a night in Luzhniki, when a thirty-two-year-old goalkeeper stood against Spain's storm and Russia held out to penalties. That night taught me that an old bird understands that landing is also a way of flying. I thought of that line watching Dvorkovich leave the chair. Not every withdrawal is a defeat. But every silent withdrawal leaves a vacuum the successor must fill with his own body.

What will tell us the truth

There are signals I will track over the next three to twelve months, and I invite readers to track them too.

The result of the September 26 vote in Samarkand. It determines the sport's governance direction and is the first hard data point.

Any statement from Carlsen or Nakamura about the championship cycle. A clear commitment or a clear refusal is worth more than any rumour. Silence is worth nothing at all.

Compliance progress on the Russia and CAS file. It is externally driven, so it will reopen regardless of who wins.

Publication of the conflict-of-interest rules if they pass, especially the question of whether they apply to leadership.

And finally, any change to the format structure of the championship cycle. That is where real power flows.

Freezing a moment

I once wrote that on the day the heart stopped, I learned to beat slower but deeper. I wrote it after a June evening in 2026, when a player fell on the pitch and my colleague in Copenhagen told me to look at the circle of people shielding him. There was no scoreline that night. Only a circle of arms.

Chess now needs such a circle in its own way. Three candidates are competing to lead a sport whose greatest asset sits not in a vault but in the memory of hundreds of millions. That memory never receives a red card, is never suspended, is never sanctioned. It simply remains, waiting to be used properly.

On September 26, in Samarkand, the federations will raise their hands. Their ballot names no game. But it will decide which games are allowed to matter over the next decade, who may play them, and at what speed.

To me, that is the kind of move whose consequences take years to see. A silent move, played on a board no one is permitted to look at — yet shaping the whole position on the other side of the city, where young people are still playing blitz on their phones, unaware that the rules of their game are being rewritten in a hall a few kilometres away.