Samarkand, September 26: The Ballot That Will Write the Rules of the Biggest Game

On the morning of September 18, I sat in the newsroom in Saint Petersburg reading a Reuters report about a vote to be held in Samarkand on September 26. Outside the window, the birches had begun to turn yellow. In the report, a German businessman named Wadim Rosenstein claimed he has "the best relations with Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura" among the candidates, and that he would bring Carlsen back into the world championship cycle.

What made me stop was not the promise. What made me stop was the empty space behind it: no mechanism, no clause, no roadmap. Just a name, and a ballot.

That ballot belongs to the FIDE General Assembly. Incumbent president Arkady Dvorkovich stepped aside after being placed on the European Union sanctions list. The three remaining candidates are all businessmen: Wadim Rosenstein, Jan Henric Buettner and Timur Turlov — none of them a product of the professional chess administration machinery.

Rosenstein is German, founder and chairman of WR Chess, an organizer of elite tournaments. Buettner is also a German businessman tied to the commercial tournament scene. Turlov is a Kazakh businessman. All three bring money, connections, and the ambition to pull chess out of its old governance model.

On another corner of the board, the two biggest names still sit outside the championship cycle. Magnus Carlsen is a five-time champion and world No. 1, with a rating hovering around 2830 and a published peak of roughly 2882 in 2026. Hikaru Nakamura sits at No. 2, rated around 2790 to 2800, with a peak of about 2816 in 2026. In 2026, Carlsen announced he would not defend the 2026 title and shifted his focus to other formats.

Running alongside that is the Russia file. 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 he will follow the ruling — "there is no way around it."

In 49 years of watching this industry, rarely has a governance vote sat this close to a purely technical question: which clock will elite chess be played on?

The classical format — long time controls, deep opening preparation, high draw rates, a slow media cycle — still holds its place of honour. Its technical moat lies in opening preparation depth and endgame technique. But that is a prestige argument, not a competitiveness argument. FIDE is not saying classical chess is more attractive; FIDE is saying it is the premier title.

Freestyle, the Chess960-style variant with randomized starting positions, reduces the value of memorized opening databases and shifts the skill axis toward raw calculation and adaptability. Rapid, blitz and online tours carry higher variance, but their streaming and commercial dynamics are far stronger.

The key point: the accelerating formats are winning audience attention, while the classical title retains symbolic primacy. Those two curves are pulling apart.

The candidate himself concedes that chess has only "a few sponsors" inside the sport. Global awareness is enormous, the sponsor count is tiny, and that gap was not created by one presidency, nor can it be erased within one term.

Drawing on my experience covering matches and tournaments, I once wrote the series "Stadium Without a Ball" during the 2026 pandemic, when the Saint Petersburg newsroom stood empty and the Russian Premier League halted. When the stadium no longer holds a ball, memory begins to score. A sport can live on memory for a while, but it cannot live on memory forever. Chess is standing exactly on that boundary: the memory of great classical games is still warm, while the new money flows toward shorter formats.

In Samarkand, people are also selling the future to buy hope. The transfer market is where people sell the future to buy hope, and an election is no different — only the currency changes: here it is the ballot.

The promise to bring Carlsen back is the hottest point of the campaign, and the least verifiable. FIDE cannot compel a player to enter the championship cycle; it can only adjust qualification pathways, wild cards, or commercial incentives. The report names no mechanism. A promise without a mechanism is a political statement, not a plan.

More telling still: the format that genuinely draws Carlsen — freestyle — is precisely the format that erodes the value of opening preparation, which is to say it erodes the technical moat of the classical title. To bring Carlsen home, FIDE may have to change the very thing FIDE wants to protect.

Rosenstein proposes that FIDE employees not be permitted to work simultaneously for private chess organizations. On its face, that is a strong anti-conflict measure. But it raises a question: would the rule bind the president's own office and the ecosystem of the man proposing it? The report does not answer. He has also faced questions over his Russia-linked business history, as WR Group previously ran logistics, certification and oil-and-gas projects in Russia, said to have been dropped after 2026 sanctions.

Ironically, the Russia plank is the least controversial part of his platform, simply because it is legally framed and leaves little discretion: "no way around it." The controversy sits with the person, not the file.

I sat in the Luzhniki stands in 2026 and wrote about a 32-year-old goalkeeper standing firm amid an opponent's storm of possession. On the Luzhniki night, the old bird understood that landing is also a way of flying. At 65, I have come to see that institutions are the same: sometimes flying on is self-destruction, and landing in the right place is the only way to survive. For FIDE, the question is not whether to keep the throne or give it up, but where to land.

On September 26, in Samarkand, a ballot will fall. It will not decide who is the strongest player in the world. It will decide who gets to write the rules of the biggest game.

If, within three months of the vote, a concrete document appears setting out qualification pathways for the top players, that promise begins to carry weight. If there is nothing but private meetings and shared photographs, chess will have changed its goalkeeper while keeping the same game.

On the day the heart stopped, I learned to beat slower but deeper. A federation must learn the same, or it will have no beat left to count.