Samarkand, September 26: Chess Votes for the Keeper of Its Own Memory

A living room with no spectators

My living room in Nha Trang, late September afternoon. The ceiling fan turns slowly, rattling like the engine of an old boat offshore. On the wooden table I leave an unfinished position — a game I have been playing against myself for three weeks, refusing to end it because I do not want it to end. The white pawn on d5 has sat there so long I have forgotten where it came from. Some positions stand still long enough that people assume they are drawn. They are not. They are only waiting for someone to dare the next move.

That afternoon I opened my phone and read the Reuters report, published on September 18. There was no beautiful image to remember. No applause, no camera sweeping across a grandstand. Just a dry line: the International Chess Federation (FIDE) will vote for its president on September 26, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. A candidate named Wadim Rosenstein has pledged to bring Magnus Carlsen back into the classical world championship cycle, and to reform FIDE's governance.

I read it a second time. Then a third. Every stadium I walk through has a hidden door, and the entrance is always a person. In Samarkand this time, that door is not on the board. It is inside a ballot.

Three names, one room, a few days

Some context for readers new to this story. FIDE governs world chess, holding authority over formats, calendars, and the commercial rights of every world championship. Incumbent president Arkady Dvorkovich stepped aside after being placed on a European Union sanctions list. He left under external pressure, not because of a no-confidence vote from within. This transition is taking place under geopolitical duress, not along any organisational health plan.

Three names stand before the ballot. Wadim Rosenstein, a German businessman, founder and chairman of WR Chess, which has organised elite tournaments. Jan Henric Buettner, also a German businessman, tied to the Freestyle chess ecosystem. And Timur Turlov, a Kazakh businessman backed by his group's financial capital. All three come from outside the traditional chess administration machine. None rose through national federations, none came up from the arbiter's chair or a technical commission.

In thirty-two years commentating on chess for VTC, I have watched the FIDE presidency change hands more than once. But never have I seen an election in which all three candidates are people who hold money and hold tournaments, rather than people who hold rules. That is a paradigm shift. It is simply what is happening, and what is happening usually arrives before people have prepared their questions.

The window between the report's publication and the vote is so short that a genuinely thick public debate is nearly impossible. At sixty-five, I have learned that the largest decisions are often made in the thinnest stretches of time. A vote held days after candidates appear in the press is a vote most of the public will not finish reading about.

A pledge that cannot run itself

The first thing to say clearly: the pledge to bring Carlsen back is not a self-executing act of FIDE.

Magnus Carlsen, five-time world champion, world number one, once near 2882 in 2026, still sits around 2830. The rating figures I use here are approximate reference points and require re-verification against official data. In 2026 he announced he would not defend the title in the 2026 cycle. Since then he has kept playing, kept winning, but on other stages.

FIDE has no power to summon a player back. No article of its constitution permits it. What FIDE can do is adjust qualification pathways, open additional wild cards, or redesign prize structures and commercial rights so that participation becomes worthwhile. The pledge to bring Carlsen back is, in substance, a pledge about incentive design, not about personal relations. This is the point most reports skip, because it is less appealing than a story about two men.

In 2026 I spent two months following a boy named Nguyen Van Hai in Nha Trang, who ran 400 metres in 47.80 seconds at a grassroots meet and was not selected for the provincial team because there was no training budget. I shot those two months on a phone, from the beach to a dirt track. Nobody called him back. But a local company sponsored him, simply because they saw him run. In the age of thirty-second video, I spent three months listening to a man talk about the 400 metres of 2026. The lesson: to bring someone back, you fix the door, not shout their name louder.

Carlsen holds the leverage. FIDE needs him more than he needs FIDE. The commercial value of the classical crown has a ceiling while the sport's most recognisable figure stands outside. It is a classic asymmetry, and asymmetries are never resolved by a declaration. The report recounts a pledge. It does not recount a commitment from the player. Those are very different things.

The only technical axis that matters is format

The only genuine technical content in this story is format, and the balance is tilting against classical chess.

Classical chess is the traditional format: long time controls, deep preparation, high draw rates, a slow media cycle. Its technical moat is opening depth and endgame technique. A top player may spend thousands of hours memorising opening lines, and in a classical game that memory bank is a legal weapon. People call it preparation. I call it a library carried into the playing hall.

Freestyle — the Chess960 line with randomised starting positions — erodes exactly that asset. When the opening position never repeats, players must calculate from move one. The skill axis shifts from who remembers more to who adapts better. For a player who has invested most heavily in opening databases, this variant is both a threat and an invitation. Carlsen has never hidden his interest in it.

Rapid, blitz and online events are simpler still: shorter, higher variance, tied to streaming platforms. They need no grandstand, no stadium, no open library of books. They need a stable connection and a good enough recommendation algorithm. And they are winning precisely where classical chess used to win: the audience's time.

I walked through empty stadiums in 2026, when every competition was suspended. Empty stadiums, but the applause of 2026 still rings inside every old record. That year I found an old VHS tape in storage, footage of 800m record holder Nguyen Thi Minh Phuong, who once ran 1:58 but was struck from the 2026 Olympic list over an administrative error. I video-called twelve retired athletes of her era to piece the memory together, and made the documentary Empty Stadiums — Dreams Frozen. What I learned: when a system abandons a person, they do not lose the achievement. They lose the audience. And losing the audience is losing everything else that remains.

Classical chess sits in exactly that place. It has not lost its legitimacy. It is losing attention.

The file with the least discretion

The Russia file is the least discretionary plank of Rosenstein's platform, and also the least controversial.

In June, FIDE temporarily suspended the Russian Chess Federation because it failed, within the prescribed deadline, to comply with a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruling concerning the incorporation of chess organisations from occupied Ukrainian territories. This is a legal story, not an opinion story. Rosenstein says he will follow the CAS decision, adding that there is no way around it.

There is always a way around it — that is what sports politicians want to believe. In this file, I do not think there is enough room to bend. CAS does not negotiate by term. Once a ruling exists, it stands, whoever sits in the chair.

Precisely for that reason I am cautious about the simplified reading. Complying with the law does not mean solving the problem. It only means the organisation is not suspended further. The Russia question will return, again and again, because it is imposed from outside rather than chosen by FIDE. No presidency closes that file permanently. It is the kind of risk one can manage, not erase.

The rule-writer and the tournament-owner

The biggest collision point is here: the man who wants to rewrite the rules already owns a significant part of the playing field.

Rosenstein is founder and chairman of WR Chess, an organiser of elite tournaments. He was also linked to WR Group Holding, a group with logistics, certification and oil-and-gas projects in Russia, reported to have been dropped after the 2026 sanctions. On the campaign trail he has been questioned about those business ties.

He proposes something notable: FIDE employees should not be permitted to work simultaneously for private chess organisations. On its face, that is a strong anti-conflict measure. It separates the rule-holder from the tournament-holder, reducing the risk that a governance decision bends toward a particular business.

But I read that proposal and ask: whom does it bind? FIDE employees, or the FIDE president too? The report does not answer. The man proposing the rule is the founder and chairman of a tournament organiser. If the hand writing the rule does not place itself beneath it, the rule is only a signboard.

I do not want to go too far. Nothing in the report suggests Rosenstein has done anything wrong. At my age I am too familiar with people turning a question into a verdict. But I am equally familiar with sports organisations believing goodwill can replace mechanism. It cannot. Mechanism is the only thing left when goodwill runs out. And a vote to elect a reformer, in which the reformer is the first test of his own proposed code, is a test worth following to the end.

The best player and the title-holder

There is a gap in this story that the report touches and then leaves.

Carlsen is world number one. Hikaru Nakamura is number two, oscillating between roughly 2790 and 2800, with a peak near 2816 in 2026. Both sit outside, or at the edge of, the classical world championship cycle. The world title is still awarded, still held by someone, but the two most recognised players in the sport are not on the path that leads to it.

The distance between the best player and the title-holder is widening, and that is a structural problem, not a personal one.

Nakamura is framed mainly as a media asset: a streaming player, an American, a name that draws views. His competitive strength and his traffic value are two different things, and the report blends them. Rosenstein claims he has the best relations with both Carlsen and Nakamura among the candidates. I read that as campaign positioning, not verifiable data. Personal relations do not create a place in the cycle. Only regulations and prize money do.

Based on my experience following matches and championship cycles, chess has never depended on a single person to this degree. In the 1980s and 1990s, when I sat commentating on the classic finals, you could name five or six top players and any of them could pull an audience. Now the only anchor large enough to draw mainstream coverage is one man, and he is outside. That is single-point dependency, and the only cure is developing more stars — a decade-long project.

The most convincing gap

The commercial gap Rosenstein himself identifies is the most convincing part of his platform.

He says there are only a few sponsors inside chess. I believe that qualitatively, though I have no specific figures to verify independently, so I mark it as the candidate's statement rather than a verified fact.

But I believe it, because I have seen the consequence across forty-nine years. Chess is among the most widely known sports on the planet, with hundreds of millions who know the rules, and simultaneously among the thinnest in sponsorship base within that group. The gap between fame and sponsor count is a paradox nobody has solved, not because nobody tried, but because nobody would change the product structure. To earn money, you must sell something with a calendar, a story, a clear ending. Chess still sells a multi-year cycle most viewers cannot follow.

In 2026 I followed seven Vietnamese fans on a bus across Russia during the World Cup. In Kazan, in the snow, their bus broke down on the night Vietnam played Iran. An elderly Russian fan drove them to the stadium in an old UAZ. My series passed one million views. But what I remember most is not the views. It is how many people watch sport only to see themselves in it.

That is the question chess has never answered. Who is the chess viewer's self?

Where I go against the grain

The common reading holds that the Samarkand ballot is a contest between a reformer and an old machine, between classical and commercial chess, between Carlsen and FIDE. I do not think so.

This election does not revolve around chess. It revolves around the calendar.

Whoever controls the calendar controls the value of every title. Classical chess retains symbolic legitimacy, and that is true at the level of memory. It no longer retains commercial legitimacy, and that is true at the level of revenue. Rosenstein defends the position that the classical crown must remain the premier title. But that argument is a prestige-preservation argument, not a competitive-strength argument. He is not saying classical is better. He is saying it must stand above. Those differ, and the difference will surface the moment there is a dispute over a qualifying place.

The second paradox, and I think the most overlooked. All three candidates are businessmen who own chess assets. Putting infrastructure owners in charge of the infrastructure regulator can produce an unintended effect: it forces the rules to be written more precisely, because the rule-writer best understands where the loopholes are. A president with no private chess assets has little incentive to define conflict of interest exactly. A president with assets is forced to define it, or be defined by it.

That does not make the risk vanish. It relocates the risk. And relocated risk is still risk.

The third paradox: if Carlsen does not return after this vote, the greatest damage does not fall on Carlsen. He still has online events, Freestyle, a career designed on his own terms. The damage falls on the man who promised. A promise about someone else is always the fastest-depreciating asset in sports politics, because it lies outside the promiser's control.

The move nobody dares

I turned off the phone and looked again at the unfinished position. The white pawn still sat on d5. For three weeks I had not dared the next move, afraid it would end a game I was not ready to end.

Chess is in such a position too. It is not drawn. It is only waiting for a move nobody dares take responsibility for.

A record is never old; it is only waiting for someone who knows how to listen.

On September 26, in Samarkand, someone will cast a ballot. I will sit in Nha Trang, reopen the board, and ask myself: if I were choosing the keeper of this sport's memory, would I choose the one who promises the most, or the one who has stayed quiet long enough to understand what he is promising?