When Timur Turlov first entered the 2026 FIDE election, the contest was easy to frame as a change at the top of world chess. His more consequential argument, however, concerns what should change beneath it: how the international federation serves its members, distributes opportunity and measures whether its programmes work.
The 38-year-old founder and CEO of Nasdaq-listed Freedom Holding Corp., president of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation and president of the
