The Power Game in Samarkand: The Promise to Bring Carlsen Back and FIDE's Real Void

The vote will take place on September 26 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Only days remain. In an organizational election, what haunts me is not the list of candidates, but an empty chair — the chair of the world's number one player in the classical championship, where Magnus Carlsen has not sat since 2026, when he announced he would not defend the 2026 world title. No one sits in that chair, yet it is still there. And with each round that passes, people look at it a little longer. From the days I rewatched tournament footage to transcribe every name, I learned that in sport, what is absent is often louder than what is present. So it is here. Carlsen's empty chair is the background noise of the FIDE election. The microphone does not make the storyteller. It is the silence of the stands that signs every line of commentary. And inside that void, three candidates are trying to out-shout one another. Wadim Rosenstein, a German businessman and founder of the WR Chess tournament organization, has pledged to bring Carlsen back into the classical world championship cycle. He claims the best relations with Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura among the candidates. The other two are Jan Henric Buettner, also a German businessman tied to the commercial chess community, and Timur Turlov, a Kazakh businessman. Incumbent president Arkady Dvorkovich has stepped aside after being placed on the European Union sanctions list. This transition is not voluntary — it is imposed from outside, and that gives the entire race a layer of geopolitical risk a sports federation election would not normally carry. For someone who has followed chess in Vietnam for many years, from street games in Saigon to international tournaments, the shape of this race looks strange. All three candidates are businessmen; none comes from a chess administrative machine. That signals commercial capital flowing toward the seat of power in a game of the mind. But it also raises a question: when business people sit at the governing table, who controls the conflict of interest? Rosenstein has a business history tied to Russia. His WR Group holding once ran logistics, certification and oil-and-gas projects in Russia, said to have been dropped after the 2026 sanctions. He is also founder and chairman of WR Chess, an organizer of elite tournaments. He proposes a rule: FIDE employees should not be permitted to work simultaneously for private chess organizations. On its face, a serious anti-conflict measure. But it also raises a self-application question: as head of WR Chess, would the rule constrain the future president's own ecosystem? The interview does not answer. On the Russia file, he commits to following the ruling of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) — there is no way around it. This is the least controversial plank of his platform, because it is legal and low-discretion. In June, FIDE temporarily suspended the Russian Chess Federation for failing to comply, within the prescribed deadline, with a CAS ruling concerning the federation's incorporation of organizations from occupied Ukrainian territories. This file will stay hot regardless of who wins. But the element drawing the most spotlight is the least verifiable: the promise to bring Carlsen back. And beneath it lies a quieter fight — the fight between classical chess and the new formats. Carlsen no longer plays only classical chess. He competes in rapid, blitz, online events, and above all the freestyle variant — a shuffled-start format that reduces the value of memorized opening preparation and shifts the skill axis toward raw calculation and adaptability. For a player who has invested most heavily in opening databases, this variant changes the board in his favor. Faster formats are winning audience attention, while the classical crown keeps the highest symbolic status. FIDE is not claiming classical is more competitive — it is saying that is the sport's premier title. That is a prestige-preservation argument, not a technical one. Hikaru Nakamura, world number two, appears in this story mainly as a commercial asset — a streaming player with a vast following — rather than a classical title contender. Distinguishing competitive strength from traffic value is essential to reading this election. This is the core paradox I take as the center of everything. FIDE needs Carlsen more than Carlsen needs FIDE. The commercial value of the classical crown is capped when the sport's most recognizable face is missing. That means the leverage sits with the player, not the institution. A promise to bring him back without format concessions or a special qualification path is only a slogan. And a slogan cannot sign a contract. The window between the interview's publication and the vote is very short, leaving a narrow public-scrutiny span for the candidates' platforms. That favors whoever has more money or closer ties to the incumbent machinery. At the same time, the candidate himself admits a financial gap: only a few sponsors sit inside chess. That is the sport's biggest paradox — extremely high global awareness, extremely low sponsor count. The Samarkand election, then, is not just a race for a seat. It is a race between sporting purity and commercial viability, between a symbolic crown and the economy of the new formats. I once spent a month rewatching footage to memorize nearly 200 player names, after misreading a name on air. The mistake before the microphone taught me that perfection is only the draft of sincerity. With this election, the verifiable facts are the commitments on conflict-of-interest rules, on CAS compliance, on commercialization. The Carlsen promise is the emotional part — attractive, easy to spread, but without bones. People will remember the Carlsen headline. Very few will remember the name of the conflict-of-interest rule. That is the unfairness of media, and also its nature. Sport does not promise victory; it only promises a heartbeat willing to continue. But a federation must promise more than that — it must promise a rulebook clean enough for people to trust that heartbeat. After September 26, whoever takes the president's chair, Carlsen's empty seat will remain the truest measure of that person's credibility. And perhaps that unfilled void, more than any promise spoken in the final days in Samarkand, is what will shape the future of chess.