Samarkand on September 26: When Private Money Knocks on FIDE's Door

In Samarkand, a city that once sat on the old Silk Road, people still tell stories about the caravans that stopped there to trade. This September, a different kind of trade will take place inside the hall of the International Chess Federation's General Assembly. On September 26, member federations will vote for a new president. The three names on the ballot — Wadim Rosenstein, Jan Henric Buettner and Timur Turlov — are all businessmen, not career chess administrators.

What stayed with me longest when I read this story was not the betting odds on who wins. It was the detail about a candidate promising to bring the world's number one player back into the classical championship cycle. A beautiful promise. A promise that the board itself, by its nature, can never enforce.

In more than thirty years in this trade, I have watched chess get pushed onto the media stage by glossy promises more than once. And more than once, those promises dissolved exactly when the jacket came off and someone had to sit down to do the actual work.

Context: The empty chair and three strange guests

To understand why this vote matters, one simple fact is needed: the FIDE presidency is empty for a reason that lies off the board. Incumbent president Arkady Dvorkovich stepped aside after being placed on a European Union sanctions list. A Russian left the chair not because he lost a vote, but because of geopolitics.

The home field has no grandstand, but every time something shifts, the whole chess village feels the aftershock. In India, where I live and write, the news of Dvorkovich's departure was discussed more at roadside clubs than in press rooms. Children playing chess in parks do not care who sits as president. But the people who organise tournaments, who seek sponsorship, who manage calendars — they know that a new president can change the way money flows into this sport.

The three candidates above all come from outside the traditional chess administration apparatus. Rosenstein is a German businessman and chess promoter, and the founder and chairman of an organisation that runs elite tournaments. Buettner is also a German businessman, tied to the ecosystem of commercial chess events. Turlov is a Kazakh businessman with capital strength.

What stands out is this: all three are people with money or assets inside the chess industry. The sports diplomats with neat ties and long administrative résumés are gone. In their place are people who have written cheques to rent tournament halls.

The timing matters too. The vote takes place only days after the news broke. The window between the public learning of it and the ballot being cast is far too short for platforms to be dissected carefully. A race that favours those with existing connections and resources.

Core point one: A contest of capital holders

I once thought chess was a sport of few words and silent wooden boards. Years ago, while still running small tournaments, I wondered why people accepted this sport staying so poor. The answer I eventually received did not lie on the board but on the balance sheet.

Chess has enormous awareness, yet the number of sponsors directly involved in the competitive system is thin. The candidate Rosenstein himself acknowledges this when he says that only a few sponsors genuinely exist inside the sport. That paradox — global fame, thin wallet — is the root of every reform ambition.

The new leadership generation, therefore, cannot be people who merely guard the rules. They must be people who can turn fame into revenue. And precisely as that need peaked, the businessmen appeared.

Based on my experience covering matches and tournaments across the Chinese and Indian markets, I have noticed a pattern: wherever private money enters, the rules of the game change. Money does not merely pay for players' hotel rooms. Money buys calendars, buys entry slots, buys attention. And when money enters the highest house of governance, the line between administrator and businessman starts to blur.

A chess commentator from a television station once told me that chess is like an old village with a well at its centre. Whoever controls the well controls the village. Today, people no longer fight over the well. They fight over the pipes.

Core point two: The Russia file and the arbitration court

Within the governance file of this vote, one item cannot be avoided: the Russia and Belarus story.

In June, FIDE temporarily suspended the Russian Chess Federation because it failed to comply, within the prescribed deadline, with a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The ruling concerned the federation's incorporation of organisations from occupied Ukrainian territories. A legal issue pushed into a political one, and then back into a legal one.

Candidate Rosenstein commits to following the CAS decision, adding a neat line that there is no way around it. This is the least controversial plank of his platform, because it is framed in legal language. When a person says there is no other way, that person is binding his own hands against discretionary power. And in sports governance, binding one's own hands is sometimes the only way to preserve credibility.

But it is also the most fragile point. CAS does not issue rulings on the calendar of general assemblies. Rulings come when they come. And any FIDE president will have to live with a file that can flare up at any moment.

I once sat in a meeting room where people argued for three solid hours about whether to invite a team from a sanctioned region. By the end, the decision was made not on principle but because a sponsorship contract had already been signed. That was when I understood that in sport, legal and financial arguments often fight in the same room, while ethics waits in the hallway.

Core point three: Conflict of interest and the self-application question

And here is the hardest part of the story.

Rosenstein has faced campaign questions over his business links to Russia. His company, according to the information reported, once had logistics, certification and oil-and-gas projects in Russia, said to have been dropped after the 2026 sanctions.

Alongside that, he proposes a rule: FIDE employees should not be permitted to work simultaneously for private chess organisations. On paper, a very strong anti-conflict measure.

But it raises a self-application question. He is the founder and chairman of an organisation that runs elite tournaments. So if the rule passes, would it constrain the future president's own ecosystem? The source article does not resolve this. And that silence is worth recording.

In documentary writing, I learned one thing: the most important detail is often the one people do not say. Not the denial. The gap. When a platform states a beautiful principle but does not say to whom it applies, that gap is itself a statement.

Picture the worst scenario plainly. One person holds the chair of the highest governing body while also owning a tournament-organising entity. Those two roles sit at opposite ends of a contract. One side writes the rules; the other organises events under them. Even if that person is entirely clean, the shadow of doubt grows longer than the fact.

I do not want to turn a businessman into a villain. The chess village needs people who put money in. But when money both pays the bills and writes the laws, transparency ceases to be a moral choice. It becomes a survival condition.

Core point four: The format war and the off-axis throne

The real board of this vote is not in Samarkand. It lies in the split between competitive formats.

On one side is classical chess — the long-standing championship format, long time controls, deep preparation, high draw rates, and a slower media cycle. Its technical moat is opening depth and endgame technique. This is the format FIDE wishes to preserve as the most prestigious title.

On another side are the newer formats: freestyle with randomised starting positions, rapid, blitz, and online tours. Freestyle reduces the value of memorised opening preparation, shifting the skill axis toward raw calculation and adaptability. Rapid and blitz carry higher variance and stronger streaming and commercial dynamics.

This is the crux: the accelerating formats are winning audience attention, while the classical title retains symbolic primacy. The two are drifting apart. More people watch a freestyle tour than watch a classical title match. But the classical world championship remains the thing every young player dreams of when they sit at the board.

I once watched a boy in Manipur play on a hand-drawn board. He did not know what freestyle was. He did not know there were online tours with big prizes. He knew only one thing: he wanted to be world champion. That is the weight of the classical title — something money can buy attention for, but not necessarily admiration.

The problem lies in this: FIDE defends the prestige of the classical title with an argument about prestige, not an argument about competitiveness. That is, it does not claim classical is harder or better. It claims it is the sport's premier title. That is a status-preservation argument. And status-preservation arguments are always vulnerable to viewership numbers.

The format war, therefore, cannot be resolved by a resolution. It can only be managed. And whoever manages it will be the president elected on September 26.

Core point five: Two stars, two doors, one grip

No article about the FIDE vote fails to mention Magnus Carlsen. And this is where the story gets interesting.

Carlsen is a five-time champion, the world number one, and the player who announced in 2026 that he would not defend the title in 2026. Since then he has been absent from the classical championship cycle, while competing actively across other formats.

Hikaru Nakamura, world number two, is also a figure of great media magnetism, combining play with streaming.

Candidate Rosenstein claims he has the best relations with both Carlsen and Nakamura among the candidates. That is a campaign statement. It is not a data point. When a candidate talks about his relationship with a star, the listener must distinguish between acquaintance and agreement.

This is where I want to linger. In any scenario, Carlsen's leverage over FIDE is asymmetric. FIDE needs him more than he needs FIDE. The commercial value of the classical title falls when its most recognisable face is missing.

A durable return, if it comes, would almost certainly require format concessions or a special qualification path. No organisation can order a player to enter voluntarily. FIDE can only adjust qualification pathways, grant wild cards, or design commercial incentives.

In other words, this is an incentive-design problem, not a prestige problem. And a promise without a mechanism is only a promise.

Contrarian angle: The most beautiful promise is the thinnest promise

And now to the part I consider most important of all.

The most attention-grabbing headline is the candidate targeting Carlsen's return. It is also the least verifiable element, merely a candidate's stated intention. The paradox is this: the most verifiable parts of the platform receive the least media attention.

Look at the attention structure. Commitments on conflict of interest, on compliance with the arbitration court, on commercialisation — these are testable. Documents can be checked. Behaviour can be tracked. Results can be measured. But they do not generate headlines. They generate lines in a minutes-of-meeting record.

By contrast, the promise to bring a star back cannot be verified until that star actually signs an entry form. And it generates very large headlines.

This means the entire public attention is concentrated on the least certain part of a governance plan. If the vote fails, the promise evaporates. If the candidate wins and Carlsen still does not return, the gap between promise and reality becomes a credibility crisis in itself.

I once wrote a documentary script about a football team. Someone told me a line I never forgot: audiences do not forgive broken promises, but they forgive silence about a promise that should have been repeated even less.

There is another test worth trying. If a commitment cannot be enforced by a specific document within twelve months, it should be classed as a campaign statement rather than a platform. Apply that standard to the Carlsen promise and it is immediately clear: there is no document. Only relations.

So when people ask me who the protagonist of this vote is, I do not answer Carlsen. The protagonist is the structure. The structure that lets a thin promise become a thick headline, and a thick commitment become a small line in a record.

The poetic break: The bridge that does not connect two formats

The home field has no grandstand, but every time the ball rolls, a whole sky of memory comes rushing back.

In chess it is the same. The board has no grandstand in the literal sense, but every time two players sit down, a world of memory opens. Memory of openings learned, defeats endured, teachers who have passed.

The problem of this period is that FIDE is trying to build a bridge between two format shores while nobody really wants to stand in the middle of it.

This shore is the classical title with its symbolic weight. That shore is the fast formats with their commercial weight. People tell each other the classical must be preserved. But they also tell each other money must be made with the fast.

And the young generation of players, who grew up with screens rather than tournament halls, no longer see those two shores the old way. To them, a seven-hour title game may be less compelling than a five-minute tour full of emotion. That is not the decline of chess. It is the shift of a generation of audience.

In India, where chess is exploding in young player numbers, I see two streams flowing side by side. One stream is children from villages learning from humble coaches. The other is children learning through screens, watching videos, playing on apps. Both streams are right. But they flow toward different sides of the same river.

The silence of an empty stadium during the pandemic taught me that absence has a voice too. In this vote, the absence is a concrete mechanism to connect the two format shores. And that absence is speaking louder than any statement.

Core point six: Commercialisation and the crack in the model

The commercialisation plank is the most economically credible part of the platform.

Chess has extremely high global recognition but very few sponsors directly inside the competitive system. The gap between recognition and sponsor count is the sport's largest growth space. This is a measurable fact, and the foundation for any serious reform programme.

But it is also the easiest place to be deceived.

I once spoke with a sports marketer in Bangalore. He told me sponsors do not buy a sport. They buy certainty. They want to know when a tournament happens, where it is broadcast, who plays, and who watches. Chess, with its constantly shifting calendar and fragmented format system, offers very little certainty.

So commercialisation is not about inviting more sponsors. It is about creating a predictable product. And to do that, one must resolve the format war first.

There is a paradox here: the fast formats — easier to sell, easier to stream, easier to create viral moments — are treated like second children while the classical title is kept as the firstborn. If anyone wants to make real money, they must admit that the firstborn and the second child are playing two different sports inside the same family.

Core point seven: Systemic risk and three pressures at once

What is most worrying about this moment is that three pressures arrive together.

First, a leadership transition forced from outside. Dvorkovich left the chair because he was sanctioned, not because his term ended or he lost a vote. That means continuity of the governing apparatus is broken.

Second, an unresolved legal file concerning Russia and Belarus, and it is not FIDE's to decide. An international arbitration court decides it.

Third, a conflict-of-interest risk sitting at the candidate level, with a business history and ownership of private chess organisations.

Any one alone is manageable. Three at once, revolving around a single vote, creates a high level of systemic exposure. This is not a normal moment in the governance history of this sport.

I lived through the period when chess in India had no proper arenas. Organisers back then reached into their own pockets, rented rooms, printed pairings. They had no international body behind them. So when I look at the Samarkand vote, I look from the angle of people who once had to fend for themselves. To them, a good FIDE president is one who makes things a little more certain. A bad one is one who makes things harder to predict. Nothing more is needed.

A second contrarian angle: Self-imposed transparency is a double-edged blade

Back to the rule the candidate proposes: FIDE employees should not work simultaneously for private chess organisations.

On paper, a good rule. It separates the lawmaker from those who play by the law. If implemented seriously, it could set a new governance standard for the whole industry.

But there is a trap. If the rule applies only to employees and not to the person at the top, it becomes a clearing tool rather than a moral barrier. It clears the path for the lawmaker, while the barrier is built on the side of those who do not make the law.

This is the kind of paradox I see often in sports organisations. People reform by limiting others. And they exempt themselves by redefining the scope of the reform.

To test this, one question suffices: if the rule passed tomorrow, would its proposer have to resign from his chairmanship of the tournament-organising entity? If the answer is no, the rule is incomplete. If the answer is yes, that is a major political act nobody could ignore.

The source article does not answer this. And that silence is a data point.

In my interview work there is a principle: when a subject goes silent exactly where you need them to speak, you have found the story. You do not need a confession. You only need to record the silence.

Core point eight: The star as a channel for capital

There is a truth rarely stated in sport: a star is a channel for capital.

When Carlsen and Nakamura enter a tournament, money follows. Sponsors want their names beside familiar faces. Streaming platforms want them in prime time. Fans pay to watch them. So their participation is not merely a sporting fact. It is an economic variable.

This explains why the promise to bring them back is so attractive. It is not only a promise about sport. It is a promise about cash flow.

But it also explains why the promise is fragile. Because it depends on the decisions of two individuals with their own interests, schedules and priorities.

In other words, the entire media appeal of this vote rests on the shoulders of two people who are not in the vote.

I once watched a match where a young player sat opposite a former champion. The boy did not win. But afterward he told me he had learned one thing: sometimes you do not need to win. You just need to make others remember you are still in the room.

Carlsen, in a sense, is doing exactly that. His absence is also a statement. It says the classical crown is no longer the centre of this sport's universe. And a vote on the sport's future cannot ignore that fact.

Core point nine: Decision timing and the narrow scrutiny window

There is a technical detail worth remembering: the vote takes place only days after the news emerged.

That window is too short for platforms to be publicly dissected. It favours candidates with existing connections and financial resources. It disadvantages anyone who wants the public to understand every detail before the ballot is cast.

This is a structural feature of elections inside sports organisations. Member federations vote. Fans do not. So the pressure for transparency is often weaker than the pressure of connections.

But this era has another feature. Everything is recorded. Every statement can be looked up. Campaign promises will outlive the terms of those who made them. A candidate promising a star's return will be reminded of that promise after one year, two years, three. The public has a long memory, even when federations vote quickly.

In my documentary years, I learned that the camera always records more than people want. When I filmed an empty fence outside a stadium, I was not trying to manufacture tragedy. But the image was itself a reminder. In sports politics too. What is not done becomes an image of its own.

Core point ten: The transmission map and where money flows

Let me draw a simple map of how this industry flows.

Upstream is institutional authority and talent supply. Midstream is the championship cycle, the formats and the platforms. Downstream is content and commerce.

The election result sits upstream. It does not directly create a single game. But it determines the rules of play for thousands of games behind it.

The balance between classical and alternative formats sits midstream. It determines what content is produced, which players are invited, which sponsors are approached.

Star participation is a transmission channel from institutional decisions to downstream commercial value. If the cycle re-attracts them, sponsorship and viewership follow. If not, the classical title's commercial ceiling stays where it is.

And downstream, where content meets commerce, this vote's success will be measured by contracts signed, not speeches delivered.

This is what I want to stress to those who follow this sport purely as fans. The Samarkand vote sounds remote. But it will decide which tournaments are held, which players are invited, and whether children in places without grandstands still get a chance to see the big names play.

A third contrarian angle: The fight for the chair is not the fight for power

There is a common misconception that whoever wins the vote controls the sport.

Reality is different. A FIDE president controls the calendar, the qualification system, and the commercial rights of FIDE events. But the chess market today has many other power centres: online platforms, private tournament organisers, independent tours.

So winning the vote does not mean controlling the whole ecosystem. It means holding one large piece in a game with many pieces.

And this is where businessman candidates hold a particular advantage. They are used to operating in multi-centre environments. They know that rules are only worth something when stakeholders accept them. They know that formal power does not automatically become real power.

But that advantage is also a risk. A person used to running their own centre of power will find it hard not to view the shared ecosystem through the lens of that centre. That is natural, and also something that needs oversight.

I do not believe in people described as flawless. I believe in systems that force people to be accountable. A good vote does not choose a saint. It chooses an architecture.

Takeaway: What will be remembered after September 26

On September 26, in Samarkand, a ballot will be cast. And afterward, as with every sports vote, everything will keep running at a pace far slower than the headlines that lifted it to the front page.

I do not know who will win. And I think that not-knowing is honest, because no polling data has been published.

What I do know is this: if the promise to bring the great star back is only a campaign statement, it will be replaced by new promises within months. But if the commitments on conflict-of-interest transparency, on compliance with arbitration rulings, and on commercial restructuring are implemented, they will leave marks for years.

The home field has no grandstand, but every time the ball rolls, a whole sky of memory comes rushing back.

The board in Samarkand has no grandstand in the literal sense either. But it has people sitting around it. And those people are deciding the memory of a generation of players not yet born.

The question I leave for anyone who has read this far is not who will win. It is: after the ballot is counted, who will be held responsible if everything stays exactly where it is?