Samarkand and the Power Game: FIDE Votes for a President in the Shadow of an Empty Throne

On 26 September, in Samarkand, delegates of the national chess federations will raise their cards to elect FIDE's next president. No clock will be pressed. No board will be set. Yet this is the most consequential game the sport has played in years.

I remember March 2026, when every tournament was postponed and I shut myself inside my apartment in Binh Duong for two weeks. Sixty days of replaying old footage, and I imagined the roar of empty seats. When there is no audience, chess returns to the sound of its own breathing. Listen closely to that breathing and you hear people arguing over the right to define what this game is.

Three businessmen and one vacant chair

This year's race has three names. Wadim Rosenstein, a German entrepreneur, founder and chairman of WR Chess, the organisation behind several elite tournaments. Jan Henric Buettner, also a German entrepreneur, tied to the Freestyle Chess ecosystem. And Timur Turlov, a Kazakh businessman. All three come from outside the chess administration apparatus.

Incumbent president Arkady Dvorkovich stepped aside after being placed on the European Union sanctions list. The sport's highest office is changing hands under geopolitical pressure.

In a Reuters interview published on 18 September, Rosenstein said he has “the best relations with Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura” among the candidates, and set the goal of bringing Carlsen back into the classical world championship cycle. That is a campaigning statement, not a signed agreement. In July 2026, Carlsen announced he would not defend the title at the 2026 world championship. Since then the highest chair in classical chess has stood empty of the world's number one.

Behind the medal lies a format equation

Two decades of commentating and writing about chess taught me one thing: the rating list tells you who is strong, while the regulations tell you who holds power. Carlsen's Elo now hovers around 2830; he touched 2882 in May 2026. Nakamura holds world number two with roughly 2790 to 2800, his personal peak 2816 in 2026. These figures are estimates pending independent verification.

The real story sits elsewhere. The two most valuable players in chess are sitting outside, or at the very edge of, the classical title cycle. Carlsen increasingly spends his time in other formats, where audiences are larger and sponsorship contracts are shorter but more frequent.

Freestyle, the variant with randomised starting positions, reduces the value of memorised opening preparation. For a player who has invested years in an opening database, that is a full renegotiation of his own worth. Rapid, blitz and online carry greater variance, shorter lifespans and far higher commercial potential than classical play, where draw rates are high and the media cycle is slow.

I commentated chess finals for VTC in the late 2000s. Back then, a six-hour classical game could still hold an audience, because viewers came to witness patience. Now viewers come to witness a moment. Those are not the same kind of contract.

Rosenstein says the classical world championship must remain the most prestigious title. That is a prestige argument, not a competitiveness argument. Nobody in this race dares claim classical is more exciting; they only claim it matters more. The separation between “who is best” and “who holds the title” is widening, and that is a structural problem, not a communications one.

Meanwhile the Russia file remains open. This June, FIDE temporarily suspended the Russian Chess Federation for failing 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 the CAS decision, arguing there is no way around it. It is the least controversial plank of his platform.

In parallel, the candidate proposes that FIDE employees should not simultaneously work for private chess organisations. As an anti-conflict rule it looks strong on paper. But he is himself the founder and chairman of WR Chess, and he previously ran WR Group with logistics, certification and oil-and-gas projects in Russia, said to have been dropped after the 2026 sanctions. Whether the rule applies to the person proposing it is something the interview leaves open.

And there is one dry fact I consider the most important of all: by the candidate's own account, chess has only a few sponsors inside the game. A sport known to hundreds of millions, paid for by a handful of brands.

The contrarian read: FIDE needs Carlsen more than Carlsen needs FIDE

Public opinion is reading this as a strong candidate bringing the biggest star home. The reverse direction is the truer one. FIDE cannot force a player to enter a qualification cycle; it can only adjust pathways, add wild cards or design commercial incentives. A pledge without a mechanism is still just a pledge.

That creates an asymmetric position. If Carlsen stays away, the commercial ceiling of the classical title stays capped. If he returns, he most likely returns on terms he sets, including fairer treatment of alternative formats.

On another level, all three candidates are businessmen who own assets inside the game. The new leadership will be people who both run the institution and organise the tournaments. The argument about “managing workload to protect players” sounds humane, and I believe part of it is genuine. But looking at the calendar of recent seasons, I see it getting denser, not lighter. Format expansion is creating more room for exhibition tours and commercial events rather than giving players their rest back.

He no longer sits in the champion's chair, but every move remains an untold story. The game ends, yet the applause still echoes in my memory.

What remains after the voting card

On 26 September the federations will pick a name. What is really being voted on is the answer to a larger problem: whether an institution can preserve the meaning of a game when its biggest star no longer needs the institution. Age does not extinguish love for the board, it only changes its colour, and institutions are no different. If the new leadership can prove the classical game still produces moments that make people hold their breath, then whether Carlsen returns becomes a secondary matter. If it cannot, the card in Samarkand will only change who sits down, not the position on the board.