The Samarkand Ballot on 26 September: Rosenstein's Pledge to Bring Carlsen Back and FIDE's Conflict-of-Interest Problem

In the large hall of the congress centre in Samarkand there is a seat that nobody has marked. It does not belong to an absent delegate. It is the emptiness that chess has carried for four years, since a July morning in 2026 when Magnus Carlsen announced he would not defend the world classical championship. On 26 September, the General Assembly of the International Chess Federation (FIDE) will vote for a new president in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Three candidates: Wadim Rosenstein, a German businessman and chess tournament organiser; Jan Henric Buettner, a German entrepreneur; and Timur Turlov, a Kazakh businessman. Rosenstein entered the race with the most-quoted line from the Reuters report of 18 September: a pledge to bring Carlsen back into the championship cycle. It is a good promise. It is also a promise that FIDE, technically and administratively, cannot deliver on its own. The gap between what is promised and what can be done is where this governance game is actually played. Three names and one forced exit The man who should have sat in the centre chair, incumbent Arkady Dvorkovich, stepped aside after being listed under European Union sanctions. This is the detail that decides the whole setting: the sport's highest leadership is changing hands not because of an internal vote of confidence, but because of a political decision taken off the board. The three remaining candidates are all businessmen. None of them rose through the traditional federation-administration pathway. That says a great deal about the moment: commercial capital has flowed all the way into the rule-making body of the game. In sport, when people who already own assets inside the industry move into governing the industry, the question stops being who is better and becomes who holds which rights, and how they will separate them. Time is short. The vote falls days after the report was published. The window for the public, member federations and players to read each platform closely is narrow. When a leadership handover happens fast, what is said loudly tends to drown out what is written down. The incoming president inherits at least four large files: the structure of the world championship cycle, the question of Russian and Belarusian participation, FIDE's commercial rights, and the institutional credibility of FIDE itself. All four share one trait: none can be resolved with a statement. A pledge that does not execute itself Start with the easiest thing to verify. The report records that Rosenstein pledged to bring Carlsen back. That is a campaign promise, not a signed agreement. Carlsen has confirmed nothing. So has Nakamura. FIDE's actual toolbox is far smaller than the volume of the pledge. FIDE can adjust qualification pathways: the Grand Prix, the World Cup, the Candidates. It can open a wild card. It can place events in a more favourable calendar slot, raise prize funds, or restructure commercial rights. What FIDE cannot do is make a player sit down at the board. The coordinates of the two central figures are clear. Carlsen is a five-time world champion, world No. 1, with a classical rating of roughly 2830 and a published peak of about 2882 in 2026. Nakamura is world No. 2, with a classical rating of roughly 2790 to 2800 and a peak of about 2816 in 2026. Both figures are approximate and pending verification before being used as hard evidence. Their positions, however, need no verification: the two most commercially valuable active players in the game sit outside or at the edge of the classical championship cycle. The claim that he has the best relations with Carlsen and Nakamura among the candidates is a piece of campaign positioning. It may be true. It is also not evidence of a commitment. Signing a contract is black and white on paper, but staying is a matter of the heart. Over years of watching players at career crossroads, I have seen them come back for three reasons: money, records, and the game itself. The first two can be negotiated with numbers. The third cannot, and it is always the reason they stay longest. In Da Nang, where I am writing this, international classical events reach Vietnamese audiences across awkward time zones, often between two and four in the morning. The number of people who stay awake for a six-hour classical game is far smaller than the number who watch a blitz arena on an online platform. Yet it is those night-owls who argue about endgames, pawn structures and technique. That captures the paradox the Samarkand ballot is forced to confront. The asymmetry sits here: FIDE needs Carlsen more than Carlsen needs FIDE. A world title without the sport's most recognisable player is still the official title, but its commercial ceiling is capped. Any promise of a return that comes without a concrete mechanism is a billboard placed outside the meeting room. Classical keeps the throne, the new formats keep the audience The only technically meaningful axis in this story is format, not moves. And it matters far more than it appears. Classical chess is the premier format: long time controls, deep preparation, high draw rates, a slow media cycle. Its technical moat lies in opening depth and endgame technique, built only through thousands of hours with databases and engines. Freestyle, the Chess960-style variant, reverses that order. Starting positions are randomised, so the value of memorised opening preparation collapses almost instantly. The skill axis shifts toward raw calculation and adaptability. For players who have invested most heavily in opening databases, this is not a minor variant. It is a revaluation of their entire capital stock. A football comparison is reasonably close: imagine that in every match the kickoff position were drawn at random and kept shifting. Every rehearsed set piece becomes meaningless. Teams that read situations survive; teams that live on scripts do not. Rapid, blitz and online events are simpler to describe: shorter, higher variance, with far stronger streaming dynamics. They do not need a federation to exist. They need a platform, a sponsor and a large enough audience. FIDE's position that the classical crown must remain central is a prestige-preservation argument, not a competitive-strength argument. The federation is not saying classical is more exciting than rapid. It is saying classical is the most prestigious title. That is a claim about hierarchy, and hierarchy has to be maintained by regulation, calendar and prize money, not by belief. Strategy is like people: it must know who it is before it wants to be someone else. A federation that has not answered which format is its spine will find every reform behind that question unstable. The empty corridor of 2026 taught me that a pitch never dies, it only waits. So does a chessboard. When classical events stopped, chess did not disappear. It moved to screens, and online player numbers surged. But that surge belonged to the platforms, not to the federation. That is precisely the problem waiting for whoever takes the chair on 26 September. The Russia file and the conflict-of-interest trap In June, FIDE temporarily suspended the Russian Chess Federation. The reason: it failed to comply, within the prescribed deadline, with a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruling concerning the incorporation of organisations from occupied Ukrainian territories. Rosenstein has committed to following the CAS decision, in language that leaves almost no room for interpretation: there is no way around it. This is the least controversial plank of his platform, and also the least discretionary. When a commitment is bound by an external ruling, it stops being policy and becomes obligation. Beside it sits a far harder file. During the campaign he has faced questions about his business links to Russia: WR Group previously had logistics, certification and oil-and-gas projects in Russia, said to have been dropped after 2026 sanctions. He is also founder and chairman of WR Chess, an organiser of elite tournaments. His proposed remedy looks strong on paper: FIDE employees would not be permitted to work simultaneously for private chess organisations. Properly adopted and enforced, that is a meaningful governance standard, because it cuts the grey zone between rule-maker and event organiser. What remains unresolved is self-application. If the rule becomes real, does it bind the ecosystem of the person leading FIDE? The report does not answer that. And the silence matters more than it looks. The biggest risk can be described in five words: governing while competing. At the top of a sports federation, when the decision-maker is also the organiser of events affected by those decisions, conflict of interest stops being an ethical accusation. It becomes a structural feature. When the cheering stops, I can finally hear the true breathing of the contest. Governance is the part of sport with no spectators. It has no goals, no highlights, no viral moments. It has only rules written carefully, or rules written so that nobody notices. The commercial gap In his platform, Rosenstein says one very simple thing: there are only a few sponsors inside chess. Measured against the game's global awareness, that is a large gap. Chess appears in films, in schools, on online platforms with tens of millions of accounts. Yet the number of major brands behind official events is implausibly small. This is the most verifiable part of the entire platform and the least covered. A promise about a superstar generates headlines. A sponsorship plan generates none. But without the second, the first will remain a nice sentence. The counter-intuitive angle The most striking thing about this race is that the priority order has been inverted. The loudest promise, bringing Carlsen back, is the least controllable for the person making it. It depends on the decision of someone who is not running. Any campaign built on a third party is betting on someone else's goodwill. By contrast, the quietest commitments are the measurable ones: CAS compliance, conflict-of-interest rules, a commercial plan. They generate no views, but they generate governing capacity. The Samarkand ballot does not create chess's identity crisis. It merely exposes what cracked long ago. The crack has three branches: the classical title is losing commercial traction, the faster formats are capturing audiences, and businessmen who own chess assets are capturing the rule-making. There is also a cyclical risk. If Carlsen does not return during the next term, the distance between campaign promise and reality will be measured. The bigger the promise, the harder the landing. In sport, a leader's credibility rarely collapses because of failure; it collapses because of the gap between what was declared and what was done. One more thing needs saying plainly, because the report implies it without stating it: a conflict-of-interest rule proposed by a candidate who owns assets in the industry is not automatically a trick. But it must be judged by whether it can apply to its author. A rule has value only when it can bite the hand that wrote it. Who serves whom Whichever way the Samarkand ballot falls, one question has already been answered: chess's centre of power has shifted away from the classical board. It now sits elsewhere, in platforms, in calendars, in contracts nobody publishes. For Vietnamese followers of chess, this sounds familiar. We still stay up for classical games, still argue about long contests, still treat the top players as the standard. But we are also watching more rapid, more blitz, more online, because that is where the game is happening. The immediate task is not to pull a superstar back with a promise. The task is to build an institution heavy enough that one day the best player wants to stay because of the institution itself, not because of a wild card. The Samarkand game has not reached its last move. And like any good game, what is worth waiting for is not the result, but how those holding the pieces play the moves that remain.