FIDE Between Two Boards: Rosenstein, Carlsen, and the Move No One Dares to Play

A quiet September night in Nha Trang, and I have two browser windows open. In one, a classical game between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana from London 2026 — move thirty, an equilibrium so flat that the audience is nearly asleep. In the other, a Freestyle Chess event streaming live, pawns placed at random, clocks ticking three times faster, commentators talking without pause. Two chess worlds running side by side in the same room, separated by a single click.

The man behind both windows — Magnus Carlsen — is absent from the place that tradition still considers the most important: the classical world championship cycle.

On September 26, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) will vote for a new president. One candidate, German businessman Wadim Rosenstein, has pledged to bring Carlsen back. I hear that line and I think of something I have told young editors for years: a record never grows old, it is only waiting for someone who knows how to listen. But this time, the question is not whether the record has aged. It is who is holding the microphone, and who is sitting in the voting room.

That is why I follow this election the way I follow a chess game. Not because any move is beautiful, but because I want to know who is playing white.

Context: an institution sitting on an unstable chair

I commentated on chess for VTC from 2026 to 2026 — thirty-two years, enough to watch FIDE pass through several presidencies, several financial crises, several moments when its own players threatened to break away. But I have never seen a General Assembly assembled under such strain as this one in Samarkand.

The incumbent, Arkady Dvorkovich, stepped aside not because he lost a vote, but because the European Union placed him on a sanctions list. A global sports body losing its top leader for geopolitical reasons says a great deal about chess's position on the world power map in recent years. No one can claim sport has nothing to do with politics anymore — at least not to me, a man who has just watched a chess game blocked by a decision in Brussels.

There are three main candidates this year. Besides Rosenstein, there is Jan Henric Buettner, a German businessman tied to the commercial chess ecosystem, and Timur Turlov, a Kazakh businessman with financial firepower. What they share: none of them comes from the traditional chess-administration ranks. For the first time in my memory, FIDE's leadership is being contested mainly by investors and entrepreneurs rather than veteran sports officials.

That is both encouraging and worrying. Encouraging because chess needs capital, needs people who can sell broadcasting rights and negotiate with online platforms. Worrying because when capital flows in, the line between administrator and businessman inside the same sport becomes thinner than ever.

I remember 2026, when I followed seven Vietnamese fans on a bus across Russia during the World Cup. In the snow around Kazan, their bus broke down on the very night Vietnam played Iran, and an elderly Russian fan drove them to the stadium in an old UAZ. That series later drew more than a million views. I learned something on that trip: the biggest decisions in world sport are usually felt first in the smallest places. The Samarkand vote will eventually reach a chess club in Nha Trang, a youth class in Can Tho, a group of teenagers staying up to watch an online event. Yet none of those places was ever asked for an opinion.

The Carlsen move: a promise that cannot execute itself

Rosenstein says he has the best relations with Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura among the candidates. He has pledged to redesign the pathway that would bring Carlsen back into the world championship cycle.

I read that line several times, and the first thing I think about is not excitement. It is mechanism.

In sport, a promise only has value when it comes with a specific enforcement mechanism. When I made a film about a forgotten track athlete, I learned something simple: never tell an audience that a character will return if you do not know by which road. An invitation to a tournament is not the same as a wild card. A wild card is not the same as a clause changed inside the regulations. And a clause is not the same as an economic incentive strong enough for a man like Carlsen — who said plainly in 2026 that he would not defend his title — to voluntarily re-enter a multi-month competitive cycle.

FIDE can change qualification formats. FIDE can open extra invitations. FIDE can raise prize funds. But FIDE cannot order a player to sit down at the board if he does not want to. That is the biggest trap of any promise carrying a person's name: it depends on another person's will, and that will can shift at any moment, for any reason — a mental strain, a more attractive sponsorship, or simply weariness with a system he once stood atop.

Carlsen is still regarded as the world number one with an estimated rating of around 2830, with a previously published peak near 2882 in 2026. Nakamura ranks second with a rating of roughly 2790 to 2800. Both are in the elite tier, and both have options that do not depend on FIDE. That is the crux any return promise must confront: bargaining power sits with the players, not the organisers. These figures are still pending full verification, but the direction is clear.

Carlsen is a five-time classical world champion. In recent years, however, he has devoted most of his time to other formats — rapid, blitz, online chess, and above all the Freestyle variant. Freestyle, or Chess960, randomises the starting position of the pieces, rendering useless much of the opening system an elite player has memorised. The best Freestyle player is not the one who knows the most lines, but the one who calculates best and adapts fastest.

For a man like Carlsen, who has openly tired of openings being flattened by software, this is a liberation. He has not quit chess. He has moved to a game where his mind is used differently. The promise to bring Carlsen back therefore cannot be merely a paper offer. It must be an incentive design that makes the classical format worth playing again — and that is far harder than a line in an election platform.

Nakamura is a different story. He is not only the world number two, but one of the biggest media assets in modern chess, with a vast online following. When candidates talk about bringing players back, they often blur a distinction: competitive value versus traffic value. Nakamura is strong in both, but the reason he appears in an electoral platform is not entirely the same reason Carlsen does. One is the symbol of the classical crown. The other is the symbol of the ability to pull audiences into whatever format he enters. To FIDE, both are precious. But precious in two different ways.

Format economics: when the classical championship bleeds viewers

What troubles me most is not the election itself, but a paradox unfolding quietly beneath every governance debate.

Classical chess is the most prestigious format. A classical game can last five, six hours, even longer. It demands opening preparation so deep that every first move is studied by a team of seconds and software. It honours endgame technique, positional control, strategic patience. I love this format. I have commentated hundreds of classical games, and I know a fine game in this format can make a viewer shudder at move forty.

But draw rates are high. Very high. Young audiences no longer have patience for three hours to watch two players agree a draw on move thirty-five. Online platforms understood this before FIDE did. They created rapid, blitz and bullet events, with a few minutes per side, with constant upsets, with commentators who can shout with excitement. These events stream live, get clipped into short videos, and spread across social media.

I have asked myself this many times: when a player can earn more money and more attention in one online rapid event than in an entire two-year classical title cycle, what reason does he have to choose the harder road? The answer is not loyalty to tradition. The answer is numbers.

FIDE faces a problem every traditional sports body faces this decade: defending a flagship format whose commercial value is declining, while new formats draw audiences and sponsorship. This is no different from what I once saw in athletics, when mass-participation marathons drew more entrants and sponsors than national championships. The question is not which format is more correct. The question is which format can sustain the sport for the next twenty years.

Rosenstein's platform lands exactly here when he speaks of expanding commercialisation. He says openly something many in the industry know but few say publicly: chess has a massive global awareness, yet the number of sponsors actually funding the FIDE system can be counted on one hand. That is a structural gap, not a single individual's mistake. It has survived several presidencies, and it will survive this election unless someone dares to restructure how the system operates.

Conflict of interest: the candidate's self-check move

But this is where the game gets complicated.

Rosenstein is not merely a governance candidate. He is the founder and chairman of WR Chess, an organiser of elite chess events. He has had business links to Russia through WR Group Holding, with logistics, certification and oil-and-gas projects, said to have been dropped after 2026 sanctions took effect.

In other words, the man running for FIDE president is simultaneously running a commercial entity inside the very field he wishes to lead. If he wins, he will sit in a position that can shape competition rules, calendars and commercial rights — things that directly affect the value of the business he owns.

At sixty-five, I have sat through enough seminars and press conferences to recognise when a reform promise is born of principle and when it is born of self-protection. Rosenstein proposes a rule under which FIDE employees would not be allowed to work simultaneously for private chess organisations. It is a sensible rule, a necessary one, and I support it in principle.

But it raises a question the candidate has not answered: if he becomes president, what role will he then hold at WR Chess?

I remember once interviewing a provincial sports official after a season full of refereeing controversy. He told me something I wrote in my notebook: the best regulation is one that applies to the person who wrote it. I have kept that line. Rosenstein can draft a very strict conflict-of-interest rule, but if that rule does not apply to the presidency itself, then it is a beautiful move on the board, not a fighting move.

This does not mean I oppose him. I have no vote, and I do not want this article to become a disguised ballot. What I want is to put the question back in its proper place: in a sport whose power is gradually shifting from governing bodies to commercial platforms and the entrepreneurs who own them, should FIDE's leader be an outsider or an insider?

The Russia file and the ghost of CAS rulings

Another front any future FIDE president must face is the Russia and Belarus question.

Last June, FIDE temporarily suspended the Russian Chess Federation because it failed to comply within the prescribed deadline with a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruling concerning the federation's incorporation of chess organisations from occupied Ukrainian territories. This is a complex, drawn-out and heavily political legal file.

Rosenstein says he will follow the CAS decision, that there is no way around it. This is one of the few statements of his I find clear and verifiable. It is not a flowery promise, but a legal compliance commitment. And paradoxically, this commitment is the least controversial plank of his platform — while being the most important one for the future of international tournaments.

I have witnessed enough crises in Vietnamese sport to know that bans and suspensions always leave long wounds. Young players growing up in a period of international competition bans lose an entire generation of opportunity. That is why I follow this file not as a neutral observer, but as a man who has seen the price of administrative decisions in individual lives.

In 2026, when every tournament was suspended by the pandemic, I was clearing a storeroom and found an old tape about a Vietnamese speed-chess record holder who had achieved a national standard but was struck from the international list over an administrative error. I video-called twelve former athletes of the same era to piece together the memory. That story taught me that the driest administrative decisions are the ones that cut deepest into lives. The Russia file at FIDE is the same. It will be recorded in minutes in legal language, but it will be remembered through the lost opportunities of young players who have nothing to do with politics.

The Russia file will return. Whoever wins, CAS compliance is externally imposed, not a voluntary choice. A president can say he will comply, but the real question is: when political pressure rises, when member federations split, when a talented Russian player stands before the chance to enter a major event — what will that leader do? The ruling exists. Enforcing it inside a divided community is the hardest part.

Counterintuitive angle: classical is not stronger, only older

There is something I want to say plainly, and I know some will disagree.

FIDE asserts that the classical format should remain chess's most prestigious title. But read the argument closely and it is an argument about prestige, not competitive strength. No one proves a classical game is harder than a Freestyle game. No one proves the classical champion is better than the champion of other formats. The only claim made is that classical is the first, oldest title, and therefore should stay at the centre.

I respect tradition. But I have lived long enough to see many industries cling to tradition like a lifebuoy, while the ship has long since changed course. If classical chess holds its central position only through historical prestige and not through competitive appeal, then it is living on its own memory.

And I know that sounds sad. But there is an upside few mention. Precisely because new formats are drawing audiences, they force the classical format to reinvent itself to compete. I have seen classical events recently experiment with new presentation, stronger live analysis, cameras inside the playing hall, human stories behind each player. Things no one thought necessary twenty years ago. The competition, painful as it is, is making classical chess more watchable.

Perhaps that is the most important move all three candidates have yet to dare: admitting that classical chess is no longer the natural centre of the sport, but must win back that position through presentation quality, through stories, through storytelling. I once made a documentary about a forgotten track athlete and realised that audiences are not impatient with slowness — they are impatient with slowness that has no meaning. A six-hour classical game can be gripping if told like a novel. If it is merely broadcast as a scoreboard, then ninety minutes or six hours are equally dull.

In the era of the thirty-second video, I spent three months listening to one man talk about a game from 2026. And that game, told properly, still makes people sit down and stay.

Who holds the microphone, and who actually sits at the board

I write this on an afternoon in Nha Trang, wind still, the sea so blue that one only wants to sit and look. On my screen, the FIDE candidates are campaigning in Samarkand. In another window, Carlsen is playing a Freestyle game in an event followed by hundreds of thousands.

I think of the nights I commentated chess for the station, when the broadcast signal was fuzzy and viewers had to wait for each move through the commentator's voice. Now everything is faster, sharper, and also more fragmented. There is no single grandstand for everyone any more. There are hundreds of small grandstands, each with its own rules, and each player must choose which one to stand in.

The September 26 vote will decide who leads FIDE in the coming years. It will shape how the body handles the Russia file, how it allocates commercial rights, and how it positions the classical format in a changed market. But what it cannot decide is whether Carlsen returns. That lies in Carlsen's hands.

I do not know who will win in Samarkand. I do not know whether the Carlsen promise will become reality or remain a move on paper. But I know one thing after more than forty years of following this sport: leaders come and go, but the board remains, and in the end people remember only the great games — whether played over six hours or six minutes, on a grand stage or in a small room in Nha Trang at two in the morning.

Every stadium I walk through has a hidden door, and the entrance is always a person. For FIDE right now, that door bears the name of a player competing in a format his own federation has never recognised as central. That paradox, perhaps, is the best move this era is waiting for someone to dare.

As for me, I will remain in Nha Trang, open two browser windows, and wait to see whose move comes next.