Interview with FIDE presidential candidate Timur Turlov

Chess is, frankly, a very under-invested sport.

We need to build much better communication.

The role of FIDE is not to become a superpower. We need to be a coordinator.

That's my pleasure.

I started to play chess with my grandfather when I was a kid, maybe 3 years old, 4 years old. I did not become a professional chess player. I never played in a chess club in my childhood. And actually, I love this game. I played with my brother, who made good progress starting at school.

And then I returned to chess when my kids started to go to school and started to learn chess in school. I think that was a very interesting experience, and I realized how great this game is, not just because of chess, but also because of those educational components. And now I think that's the game which we love with all my kids. So we're playing when I'm getting back from my work on Sundays, Saturdays, seeing some trips all together. And it's a good chance to sit with one of my kids and spend some time together, 30 minutes, 1 hour to talk to each other. Quite unique, frankly, because usually we're not talking to each other as frequently as when playing chess.

Absolutely. And I truly believe that it's a great instrument, actually, to help kids not just to start to play chess. That's very important, of course, because a lot of kids start to play chess in school when they're 5 years old and then they go to a club and some of them become champions. That's a good side effect. But the main effect is that actually chess in school helps kids to study better. It teaches kids to keep concentration, to be able to read books, which is very important right now. A lot of kids can read technically, but they can't concentrate their attention, and it's very, very difficult for them to finish a book, even as part of a test. I truly believe that combining all these benefits, that's beneficial for the sport federation, for all this professional chess development, but also beneficial for the educational system. And that's beneficial as a social component, because that helps kids to make friends, that helps even adults to make friends. And with my experience in the Kazakhstan Chess Federation, we did so many amateur tournaments for different corporations, for doctors, for police officers, for prisoners. And that helped to develop multiple social relationships.

That became a challenge. We started to collaborate with the International Chess Federation and with FIDE and with the Kazakh Chess Federation before I became president. And we started to sponsor tournaments, and I realized that the sport resonates with me very much. That's a great club of people, a lot of intelligent people, a lot of bankers, a lot of politicians, a lot of just my friends, people which I like, enjoy this game. And I also realized that chess is, frankly, a very under-invested sport. So you need billions to become visible in soccer and football, but you might invest much more efficiently investing in chess. And I think no other sport will provide you such a selected club of people with a very reasonable budget for access.

I think that brought me as a sponsor to federations. And then I realized that actually chess is on the rise, and maybe the Kazakhstan Chess Federation can benefit out of my experience as a manager, because federations, of course, need chess professionals. And I have a very strong first vice president in the Kazakhstan Chess Federation, Dinara Saduakassova, who is a world champion, grandmaster. And we have Gulmira, who is our CEO, executive director of our chess federation. She's also a women's grandmaster and also a chess professional. But sometimes you need someone with stronger project management skills, with some business skills, and combining this competence of professionals and combining some management competence can really create a lot of value. And I think we worked as a great team, and a lot of people told me that actually the Kazakhstan Chess Federation achieved a lot in the last few years. It was a very visible scale. And we now had very great progress not just in women's chess, when we always were strong, our country was strong in women's chess all the time, but we also became much stronger in youth chess. So we now have multiple world champions in the young ages, in different young ages, and that's potentially candidates to become part of the top 100 players in the future, now to fight for championship leadership in the next 5 years. And that happened because of our attention. We organized a record amount of tournaments inside the country and outside the country. We sent our chess players to multiple international competitions. We helped them to access coaching for these young players who can't support themselves, access to grandmasters. So this complex platform in the last 4 years actually delivered, in my opinion, a great result. And we built a very strong foundation. Let's still not call it a success. Kazakhstan is not yet leading the top 100 for sure, but we are on a strong way, and I'm sure if we will continue to do the same, and I will try to do as much as I can to continue to do that in the next 5 years, we can change some history and prove chess is very popular in Kazakhstan. And now it's become very popular in our business elites, in our political elites. And we feel very strong support from the president, from governments, from the prime minister, deputy prime ministers, from like city mayors, governors of regions. They're paying a lot of attention, and that helps us to raise money from sponsors, from other participants. I think now we are one of the most active federations in the country, despite we're not yet an Olympic sport, which could be another big... Yes, and the same idea brought me finally to run for FIDE, because I truly believe that my management skills, my access to partner network, my existing track record and relationships can make me an efficient president who can contribute a lot to the development of the community on a global scale, not just a national one.

I think one of the first big projects which we did together with FIDE in Kazakhstan when I just stepped into the Kazakhstan Chess Federation was a championship match in Astana between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren, 2023, if I'm not mistaken. So much has happened in the last 4 years. And that was one of the biggest events in the calendar, with a lot of preparation. We had to manage all the hotels, all the venues for the whole term of this championship. We accommodated many guests and did work together with FIDE on broadcast, on some side events. We did a lot for our kids' development, brought multiple grandmasters with different seminars, with different masterclasses. And I think that was, I think this was the first biggest test for also our national federation organizing team. And we successfully passed.

Because I want to preserve what's already achieved, and I think FIDE advanced a lot in the last terms, and Arkady did a lot of good for FIDE. But on the same hand here, I'm sure that I can help with my project management skills, with my vision of digitalization, with my own network of sponsorship, with my own relationships with many federations. And I'm sure that for me it will be much easier to manage many international affairs from Kazakhstan, who keeps some neutral position and who actually has very good relationships with many different big empires all around.

I want to develop a digital platform and help all the national federations become much more digital, to make FIDE more efficient and fast, and to let each national federation manage precisely their players, chess clubs, arbiters, align this calendar with all the global events, get access to the best learning management systems to help their members advance faster and more efficiently with some AI tools, and get much better representation in the digital world from a gaming standpoint, from a PR standpoint, which is also very important because I think that each national federation should produce not just champions, it should produce a lot of PR, because if they will communicate better with society, that will make any federation much more sustainable because of sponsorship support, because of many other things. On the other hand, I truly believe that I can bring more financial stability to FIDE. I'll promise a financial backstop from my holding to the International Chess Federation, and that might help us to build a calendar two years ahead. Because of also my network, we built many successful partnerships with Nvidia, with Citibank, with Alibaba, with Tencent, with multiple eastern and western corporations, and I will also try to engage them in this, to the sport, using all our knowledge and partnerships which we already achieved. And I truly believe that with this approach, we will try to make another move on the way to get some included to Olympiads, to Olympic Games. That's, I think, was a big ambition for my predecessors, and I am sure that we are getting closer and closer. We still need to improve our broadcasts. We still need to work with sponsors to prove the commercial potential of this game. But the game is on such a rise that, and I'm sure that if we will help with development funds, which will make emerging federations much more sustainable, which is definitely possible, I'm sure that we can get to the prime age of chess. We're already almost into it. And I will work hard to keep integrity in the community, to make sure that FIDE will work for national federations, and FIDE can achieve anything only with the help of national federations and never without that. And of course, my key goal is to be a diplomat who will build a good relationship with all FIDE members.

I'm a professional manager, so I'm managing a company with 10,000 people in the holding and even twice more in the group of companies. I do that not because I manage everything myself. I do that because I can trust people. I can find the right people. I can help to align resources and finally find a leader who will help to organize all this process. Because everything is a teamwork, especially an international federation is definitely teamwork. It's not about doing everything with my own hands. It's about selecting the right people. I will manage that as well as I manage our holding in 20 different countries simultaneously. The example of my involvement in the Kazakhstan Chess Federation, I think, should be a great example. So I managed to do that, and we advanced maybe more than any other national federation advanced in the last three to four years.