FIDE Presidential Vote on September 26 in Samarkand: The Ballot and the Ghost of Magnus Carlsen

In nearly forty years sitting at the chess commentary table, I have never witnessed a FIDE presidential election carrying so much ghostliness. On September 26, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, member federations of the World Chess Federation will vote for their leader. Incumbent president Arkady Dvorkovich leaves his seat not because he lost a ballot, but because he was placed on a European Union sanctions list. The chair stands empty. Three businessmen stand around it. And amid the noise of three names still unfamiliar to the traditional chess world, one candidate declared something that made everything fall silent: he will bring Magnus Carlsen back. I sat with that sentence for a long time. Every tournament hall I have walked through holds a secret door, and the entrance is always a person. This time, that person is not sitting behind a keyboard but standing behind a campaign microphone. The context must be laid out clearly, because this is a story of backstage power, not a game of chess. Three candidates contest the FIDE presidency: Wadim Rosenstein, a German businessman and tournament organizer, founder and chairman of WR Chess; Jan Henric Buettner, also a German businessman; and Timur Turlov, a Kazakh businessman. All three come from the world of commerce; none emerged from the professional chess administration apparatus. That in itself is a signal. Commercial capital is finding its way into the boardroom of the intellectual sport. The flashpoint of this election lies in three overlapping files. First is the Russia and Court of Arbitration for Sport file. In June, FIDE temporarily suspended the Russian Chess Federation for failing to comply, within the prescribed deadline, with a CAS ruling concerning that federation's incorporation of organizations from occupied Ukrainian territories. This is a smoldering legal file that no single sentence can resolve. Second is the question of conflict of interest at the candidate level. During the campaign, Rosenstein has faced questions over his WR Group's business links to Russia, covering logistics, certification, and oil-and-gas projects, said to have been dropped after the 2026 sanctions. He simultaneously proposes a rule: FIDE employees would not be permitted to work simultaneously for private chess organizations. Third, and this is the crowd-touching point, is the promise about Carlsen. Carlsen has been absent from the classical world championship cycle since 2026, when he announced he would not defend the title at the 2026 event. The world number one and five-time champion shifted his focus to other formats. Rosenstein claims to have the best relations with both Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, currently the world number two. That is a campaign assertion, not a commitment. I must say plainly what many are reluctant to say: FIDE has no power to force a player to enter the championship cycle. FIDE can only adjust qualification pathways, wild cards, or commercial incentives. The promise to bring Carlsen back sounds loud, but it depends on the will of a third party. In investing, people call that single-point risk. In chess, people call it an open move with no supporting piece. To understand why Carlsen matters so much to FIDE, one must look at the sport's greatest paradox. Chess is played everywhere in the world, with extremely high brand recognition, yet the number of sponsors actually funding the competition system is pitifully small. Candidate Rosenstein himself admits in his campaign platform that inside chess there are only a few sponsors. This is an extraordinary paradox, because no other sport has such a vast understanding audience while having so few who pay. Carlsen and Nakamura are the two largest commercial assets of contemporary chess. Their presence determines the media value of the championship cycle more than any institutional reform. This is an asymmetric dependency. FIDE needs Carlsen more than Carlsen needs FIDE, because the classical world title loses much of its commercial weight without its most recognizable face. A title with no viewers is just a line of text on paper. One must clearly distinguish two things that are often conflated: competitive strength and media value. Nakamura, on the rating list, is the world number two with an impressive score. But in the story of this election, he appears as an asset with audience pull, a streaming face, rather than a classical title contender. These are two different kinds of value, and a FIDE president must be able to read both. The format debate runs along the same current. The classical format, with long time controls, deep preparation, and high draw rates, carries the technical aura of opening and endgame. The freestyle Chess960 variant, with randomized starting positions, reduces the value of memorized opening preparation and shifts the focus toward raw calculation and adaptability. That is precisely the format that players most invested in opening databases have reason to be wary of, and also where figures like Carlsen find new excitement. Rapid, blitz, and online formats have far stronger media dynamics than classical chess. Here, FIDE's position that the classical title must remain central should be viewed correctly. It is a prestige-preservation argument, not a technical-strength argument. FIDE never says classical chess is more competitive; it only says it is the sport's premier title. Those are two different things. I once sat for hours in a stadium with not a single soul to reconstruct a film about an old record. The stadium was empty, yet the applause of 2026 still echoed in every old record. The chess world is the same now: the digital stands are packed with online viewers, but the seat of power still has only a few people around it. The most worrying point of this election is not who wins. It is that three pressures fall on one institution at once: a leadership transition forced from outside by sanctions, an unresolved Russian legal file, and a conflict-of-interest question right at the candidate level. Each pressure alone could be managed. All three combined around a single ballot becomes a systemic problem. The counterintuitive angle lies here. The conflict-of-interest rule Rosenstein proposes, though it sounds upright, raises a self-application question. He is the founder and chairman of WR Chess, one of the entities organizing elite tournaments. If the rule barring FIDE employees from working simultaneously for private chess organizations is passed, would it bind the future president's own ecosystem? A conflict-of-interest measure is only worth something when it cuts into the one who proposed it. The FIDE presidency is not merely an honorary title. Whoever sits in that chair controls the rules of the championship cycle and the sport's commercial rights. Therefore, the conflict-of-interest question is not purely ethical. It is economic, and it touches directly the business of tournament organizers, including one owned by the candidate himself. A transparency rule issued before the election, if unaccompanied by a self-recusal mechanism, is easily read as pre-emptive media damage control rather than a purely principled reform. A record is never old; it is merely waiting for someone who knows how to listen. The Russia and CAS story is the same. Rosenstein commits to following the CAS decision and says there is no way around it. That is the least controversial position in his platform, and also the most predictable part. But it will remain a recurring flashpoint, because CAS compliance is externally imposed rather than self-chosen. That pressure does not disappear after September 26, whoever wins. One must also look at the reverse trap of the campaign. The candidate's three most verifiable promises are the conflict-of-interest rule, CAS compliance, and commercialization reform. Those three promises will receive very little media attention. Meanwhile, the least verifiable promise is bringing Carlsen back, and it dominates the headlines. This is a dangerous imbalance. If Carlsen remains absent after the election, the gap between promise and reality will erode the new leadership's credibility, while the reforms that truly matter are overshadowed. As someone who has spent nearly half a century at the chessboard, I worry about one specific thing. If the commercial appeal of the classical cycle remains capped while alternative formats grow, the balance of power in the industry will drift toward platforms and private organizers. That is not inherently a bad prospect. But it raises the question of who holds the power to shape the rules. And ironically, those private organizers may be the very organizations the candidates lead. The ballot in Samarkand will be counted. But the bigger question remains: as speed, platforms, and commercial capital reshape how audiences consume this sport, will FIDE still hold the power to shape the calendar, or will that power drift toward places with more money and less institutional responsibility? A good leader will not answer that question with a promise about a player. He will answer it with a mechanism.