♟ FIDE Candidates Tournament 2026
🗓 Dates: March 28–April 16
🌍 Location: Cap St Georges Hotel Resort Cyprus 🇨🇾
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I'm here with Mr. Timur Turlov, who is CEO of Freedom Holding Corp. but also head of ISCF. Timur, you invest so much in chess around the world, elite tournaments and also at the school level. What does chess mean to you personally?
That's a great game which helps me to better understand how I am thinking, and when I am stronger, when I am not, when it's good to make a decision and when it's not good to make a decision. And it's a great club of beautiful people who also love chess, and it's a pleasure to be part of this club. And I truly believe that chess is one of the most popular games in the world, if we calculate the amount of players at least. And it's also, in my opinion, still a very undervalued game, because it also might have a much bigger commercial potential in the future, and we see how it's rising.
Because I truly believe that it's a great point for investment. The game is unlocking its commercial potential now, and it's becoming even more and more popular. It's very interesting. It became such more popular after mobility, after computing, and computers never killed chess. They even developed it even more.
That's a good point. And you know, I mentioned you're head of ISCF, and Freedom has brought 17 kids to come and experience the Candidates. It's such an amazing opportunity for them. Tell me a bit about that.
I truly believe that chess in school is very, very important, and we want to promote it as much as possible with resources, with some money and human resources in this field. And I do believe that chess in school is important not just to make chess players. It's important to help kids to study better, not just chess, everything, because it trains concentration, it trains strategic thinking, it trains also responsibility and your ability to think what should happen next after you move, which I think is very important in real life.
In this world of TikTok and Instagram, it's very important to be able to keep attention on something for a long period of time, and chess is a great and very fun tool to train that.
Yeah, and these kids that were chosen to come here and experience the most elite part of chess, how did that go down? How did you pick these kids and give them some lifetime opportunity?
For us, that was definitely not easy, but we love to create some opportunities for kids, because kids still do a lot of stuff. All of them are big fans of chess, and they definitely already achieved a lot during their life, but every kid can still achieve a lot until they become adults. And I hope maybe it will be inspiration for some of them to become the next champion of the world. So why not?
I played chess with my grandfather. He was a fan of chess and he also played with me. But I never had the chance to participate in such great events at that period of time, and in a very small town, actually, it was not much accessible.
And Mr. Turlov, it is of course the year of chess in education. A big year for chess, a big year for you. What do you see as being successful at the end of the year? What would make you happy that this was a good year?
To see a visible increase of people who study chess in school. We do that in Kazakhstan, and I think we will have more than 2,000 schools in Kazakhstan who will do chess lessons this year. And we are also promoting that very actively all over the world. And I hope that we will make very, attract a lot of attention to this matter and do some concrete steps to implement these programs and to start developing that, to let more and more countries join this program and to implement in some elementary schools activities, some electives, some lessons in different shapes of forms.
12 more exchanges in this transcript
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Turlov, T. (2026, March 28). Interview with Timur Turlov, Freedom Holding Corp CEO [Interview transcript]. FIDE chess. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3023523/
MLA
Timur Turlov. "Interview with Timur Turlov, Freedom Holding Corp CEO." FIDE chess, 28 Mar. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3023523/.
BibTeX
@misc{turlov2026_3023523,
author = {Timur Turlov},
title = {Interview with Timur Turlov, Freedom Holding Corp CEO},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, FIDE chess. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {mar},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3023523/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
