Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the FIDE presidential candidate Q&A session this afternoon. I would like to thank our two candidates for making the time. We did invite all three candidates, but unfortunately one of them could not make it. We're not entirely sure why, but we have our two candidates here today. So, I would like to begin with Mr. Bühner here next to me. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Hello, welcome and thank you for welcoming me. Everybody who is listening and who is looking here, I see not so many familiar faces. But of course the election that is going to take place in two days is only limited to about 200 people that can elect. So this is also why my campaign was directed more directly to these 200 people rather than to the general public. This is also why, for example, you do not see a stand here in the hall and everything, because I very much believe in the personal approach. I have personally spoken with nearly 85% of my potential voters. And so, to myself, I am 62 years old. I am born and raised in Germany.
I started my career in the mobile communications industry, being instrumental to setting up cell phone networks which is now operated under the Vodafone brand in Germany in the '80s. In the early '90s I was an entrepreneur. I started my own online service way before the internet was actually popular. The company that I founded was ultimately folded into America Online, the big online service, and was sold to America Online in 1999 for a staggering 10 billion US, which was the biggest tech deal at the time. I also made some money with this because I had a minority equity participation. I then went to California, lived there for 15 years with my family and started a venture capital fund first with $75 million and then now it's a family of funds under the name of Headline Ventures with $4.5 billion under management financing small and medium-sized startups around the world.
20 years ago when I turned 40 I went back to Germany. I bought a historic piece of land, a 450-year-old castle with 40 buildings around it, by the ocean, by the Baltic Sea between Germany and Denmark, and I converted that with my own financing, my own money, 150 million euros, into one of the most luxurious hotel resorts in Europe. Everybody's welcome to visit as a guest under the name of vizonost.de, which basically means the White House in Germany. There we had some great events like the G7 summit politically, but also chess. We did a GOAT challenge, we called it the Greatest of All Time challenge, and who is the greatest of all time? Of course, Magnus Carlsen. So Magnus and I started a company together because he wanted to play the chess variant of Fischer Random 960 on the highest level against the best players in the world. So we established this series as we call the Grand Slam Tour with nine tournaments. I raised another $28 million for that. We invested that into these nine tournaments. They happened in Singapore, in Cape Town, in Las Vegas, in Paris, also in Germany. And many of you might be familiar with the freestyle that we call it, because I named it freestyle because I thought it was better marketable to the people who are not in the chess industry. Mr. Online, Mr. Venture Capital, Mr. Hotel or Mr. Freestyle — I want to be Mr. FIDE and Mr. Chess and furthering that cause around the world. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Bühner. Mr. Turlov, may I ask you to introduce yourself?
Thank you so much. I also have an original business background. I'm running a US public company, NASDAQ-listed, with $10 billion of market cap, with the majority of business in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, in Europe, in the United States, doing digital banking, digital ecosystems, now insurance, financial services, ticketing, now different lifestyle services and telecom, including AI data centers. And I am president of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation. And I think in the last four years we really achieved a lot in my home country. We brought, I think, a good management approach, empowered a lot of chess professionals with resources, with some expertise from the marketing and PR side, with some specific financial expertise, with some specific project management expertise, and that finally turned, I think, to the biggest progress of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation among many global federations.
And two years ago we launched the International Chess in Schools Federation at the General Assembly of FIDE in Budapest. And I really believe in chess in schools. I believe that they have a very huge educational — that's a great educational tool, that's ability in this world to help our kids to keep concentration, to better study the main curriculum, and of course it's a great source of talents for professional chess. We started to build this program in Kazakhstan in 2023 from like 20, a little bit more than 20 schools, to 2,500 schools. So almost from scratch to national scale of presence, and we built an infrastructure to support that. We worked hard with our government, with universities. We adopted some minor for pedagogical programs as a chess teacher minor. And I see how impactful it is for my kids. So I have six kids and I see that actually chess is a great social tool. It's a great educational tool. It's a great tool for them to resist this social media scrolling and all this kind of addiction.
And I also see that chess has a great potential, and it's a game with a beautiful reputation which matches the current global trend very much. It's a historical sport and e-sport at the same time. And we actually started to be, I think, one of the biggest partners of FIDE over the last three years to support multiple FIDE events, championships, matches, rapid and blitz in Kazakhstan and New York City. We did multiple championships for the Chess in Schools Association, multiple conferences. We inspired some countries to start to implement chess in school, which I'm very proud of, and just today we signed a memorandum with His Excellency the Minister of Barbados, and I think that's just part of our work. So I'm very inspired with chess. I have a real passion for chess. I am a very big chess lover and I believe that my management skills, my track record of achievements in digitalization, in chess in schools, in management of a national federation will be helpful to move chess forward among FIDE, and I'm definitely committed to that, and committed financially, committed from my personal standpoint, and I think that I can bring a real impact to the community and will stand for that. Thank you.
Thank you very much. I think that was great to hear from two of our candidates who might be our next FIDE presidents, as we have elections in two days. And now I will open up the floor to the media. There is a microphone in front over here. If you would like to ask a question, you could line up at the microphone, and please again keep it to one question per candidate. Thank you.
Please introduce yourself and your outlet when you ask.
Thank you. First of all, and I want to ask a question as a former visiting professor of Radford University in Virginia. My name is Farukh and my last name is Nabiyev. I engaged in chess for more than 65 years and my small brother became a vice champion of the republic more than 50 years ago. I myself composed several chess compositions which are very interesting from the point of view of making tools for edutainment. That means education plus entertainment. So it would be very interesting for kids especially. I invented two such-called toys and even appealed to your site two weeks ago. Then I failed to communicate with you and appealed to Mrs. Nurgaliyeva, but I'm a little bit disenfranchised because we didn't do nothing, just agreed to work further. My question is: you are not a professional chess master or chess player, but as the head of a good and big company you of course have some imagination about management of big systems like FIDE, for example. FIDE now is not just a chess empire. It is chess plus, but we rely on, for example, artificial intelligence, on some sort of DeepSeek computer program. How could we estimate current trends in such big things like the change of the chess paradigm which was started by Mr. Robert Fischer with his random...
Sir, I just want to pause you right there if we can keep it to one question. Yeah, if possible you could ask. If not, it's okay because it's a very complicated science-level question. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much. So artificial intelligence was born with the help of chess. I think the first approach to artificial intelligence happens in the chess world with all this Deep Blue and many, many, many others thinking about how to solve ambiguous questions. And of course the beauty of this game is that it is somewhere in between cyber sport and very classical well-established sport, and that's maybe why if we will work hard to make this game more accessible to non-professionals and more interesting and attractive for chess viewers, that also could be a big driver for the game because the rules of this game I think are very beautiful, and definitely that's not my big intention to try to change the rules themselves. But everything will continue to accelerate and we have to continue to play and experiment carefully with the formats, with the speed of the game, and of course with the quality of analysis, with the quality of education, with the quality of studying chess, with the quality of broadcast which should explain the beauty of chess to multiple people. And I see a lot of potential there, and of course after the campaign we will be happy to collaborate with you on all other matters. The last couple of weeks we were just extremely busy to discuss any development. Seriously.
Thank you very much. There's a camera right behind the microphone. If you could maybe move your camera back to get access to the microphone easier, please. And I'll open up the floor again.
Good afternoon everybody. My name is Vlad Ghiță. I'm the secretary of the press commission at the Romanian Federation. I'm a FIDE arbiter and a FIDE instructor. My question is to Mr. Timur Turlov. You have recently filed a lawsuit against David Yada, a renowned photojournalist and a candidate for FIDE vice president. Should independent journalists who position themselves as unfriendly to you be worried that such legal action might follow?
As you see, I am one of the most open candidates for this tournament, speaking to all the press, answering all the questions, never being shy for any discussions, and I have a very long-standing reputation dealing with media and keeping this reputation, I hope, still very clean. The only thing which we cannot afford to tolerate, with all our public listings, with all our big investor community and financial community who rely on us, is false factual statements. Unfortunately we definitely tolerate any opinion about us, whether we like it or not. It's absolutely okay. But we are definitely not going to tolerate factual falsehoods. And unfortunately I have to defend myself because otherwise, if I will not do that, it will look like I'm admitting this statement if I'm not going to court to prove that that was a false statement. So I'm ready to prove that it was false and I provided all the opportunities to correct the statement and provided supporting documentation to show that before I filed this case. But if it is not, no, it's okay. So my lawyers insisted on that, it's not my personal position or wish, I don't care about that much.
I just want to ask if you do have a question that is not in English, since we have such a global media audience, to have it translated by someone when you ask. Thank you.
Hi, Abdullah Murad, tournament director of Sharjah Masters. First of all, I admire what you both are doing in chess. It's something really great. So thank you. So my question: with youngsters like Gukesh and Sindarov already shaping the future of chess, how will you give the next generation not only a place on the chessboard but also a seat at the table shaping the future of our sport? Especially that we have youth players, talent players, but we don't have young organizers, young arbiters taking positions, young members in any committee of FIDE, maybe having some youth committee, because as you can see in any government, like right now they are having a youth ministry, especially like where I am from, the United Arab Emirates. And the question is for both of you. Thank you.
Mr. Bühner, would you like to answer first?
Yes, thank you very much for the question. For me, sitting here, and I've listened to the other questions that have been very specific questions with very specific interest groups, I appreciate a question that is going more general to what we are doing. And so from my point of view in terms of the youth, I know Gukesh personally very well, Nodirbek, Vincent, all the young great players, I know them personally very well. They are certainly not lacking any opportunity to play tournaments. So that's clear. So when I interpreted the question, it's more about the general youth than the specific few persons that you mentioned. So for the youth, and I think that's a job that the FIDE president needs to take very seriously, is how to get kids, children into chess, how to keep them in chess and how to be able to have them have a future in chess. So these three things are my main priorities anyway, which is, as you are asking this, very well. So in the first phase, look at young kids. I also have kids. They are now over 30. But of course I remember when they were small, also I remember when I was small, when I was five years old in 1969, I was also playing chess in school. And we had no differentiation between girls and boys. We played all together. And I think in today's world of chess around the world, the main concern that parents have when they send kids to play chess is safety. There's a lot of problems around young children, girls and boys these days. And so my first priority for young children is to create a safe environment, having very strict rules for child molesting, child predators, all this kind of stuff that's happening in all kinds of sports. But especially also in chess it's very important to take care of that.
The second phase, and it's basically more to your question, how they can stay in chess, it's also directed at girls, how girls can stay in chess. We have to make chess cool, really cool, because if you look at girls at 12, 13 — I have a daughter of course as well, she's now also 32 — but when they grow up, girls are very much interested in, you know, how they look like, and so I know what are the cool girls doing. So we have to get chess to a point that the cool girls are playing chess and the cool boys are playing chess. And that is an environment that I try to create a little bit with the Freestyle Chess Tour, where I brought women like Bibisara Assaubayeva or Javokhir Sindarov and all these people, making them stars in their own show. So I provided them colorful velvet jackets that look like Formula 1 stars. We had great introductions. So to make them role models so that the young kids can say, wow, that's something that I would aspire to. At the same time also the third phase is creating lucrative possibilities. So safety, coolness, and lucrative. So lucrative, looking at that because we can combine it. For example, I have been in very strong communications with the big brands, Louis Vuitton, Hugo Boss, the whole universe of Formula 1 sponsors. Like, I don't know whether you know, but Louis Vuitton is the biggest sports sponsor in the world. They sponsor the Olympics, Formula 1, soccer and so on. They would love to be involved, and if we get them involved in a sport like chess, then the girls will also be interested to stay because they see, ah, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, you know, this is kind of the brands that want to market to the girls. And that is the way that I'm trying to get the interest of the youth and the possibility and the prospects for the youth in chess.
Thank you, and my answer. So yes, we will definitely consider this sort of youth commission in FIDE. That's a great idea. We already started with our media initiative to help federations develop not just the sport part but also the media part of their job, to make sure that they will have some media department, SMM department, and of course it will be for young youngsters to come, and we will help them with the training, with some guidelines, with KPIs, with funding of this initiative to national federations. And of course we will also suggest maybe to create some other foundations to help emerging federations to invest more in organization of tournaments and for, yes, to growing their chess organizers, arbiters. But I'm not sure that arbitration usually requires a little bit more maturity, so that's not usually a profession which we expect in childhood. But I'm sure that of course we should get more non-sport people into chess, so not just professional chess players, that will be very beneficial for the community, and I will definitely advocate for that.
Thank you. I just want to say because we do have a few journalists waiting in line, if we can keep it to one short question for only one candidate. Thank you.
My name is Yossi Pessik, American Chess Magazine.
Please, the first question for our lovely Chair. Is it known why the third candidate, Mr. Rosenstein, couldn't join us today?
Sorry. Could I ask you just to speak a little closer to the mic?
Can you take it into your hands?
It's okay. It will be better, I hope. Ah, okay. This is much better. So, first question. My name is Yossi Pessik from American Chess Magazine. First question for our lovely Chair: is it known why the third candidate, Mr. Rosenstein, couldn't join us today? And consequentially, what other candidates could comment on that fact? And also I'm curious, after the election, do you think that there will be a space for cooperation between each other, I mean each candidate, for the future of chess?
So I will keep it to only the first question since we want one question. All three candidates were invited with enough time to respond and make time, but unfortunately we just didn't get a confirmation from Mr. Rosenstein. Thank you.
First I want to thank the candidates who are here for their time and for answering questions from the media. I have two questions, one for Timur and one for Bühner. I'll just ask the one for Bühner for now. I have many colleagues wanting to ask questions so I'll come back if there's time. One thing that struck me in one of your earlier answers is highlighting the lucrative nature that you wish chess to occur, and of course FIDE is a nonprofit entity. So the question I want to ask is: if you do become FIDE president, how would you handle relationships with FIDE's commercial partners? For context with this, you know, Lichess in the past had some issues with the Freestyle Tour where we were told verbally that media accreditation for the tour would be very difficult due to existing commercial partnerships, and our requests for accreditation were ignored or refused by Freestyle. Equally, for the first time since having online qualifiers for the Chess960 World Championship match, Lichess did not co-host online qualifiers, but all of the online paths went solely to one online platform. So therefore, can you commit that as FIDE president you would give fair access to all platforms and resist the pressures of commercial partners to encourage a free market and fair competition? And if so, how would you do this?
First of all, as I was mentioning also with the question for Timur, I would rather answer questions that are really interesting to the general public and we can take these things offline. That was like in the past with Freestyle Chess and so on, which I do not present anymore, similar like Timur has these other issues. I think that's nothing we should discuss in the big audience. What you are making a very good point is you are representing Lichess, which personally I use as a platform. I like it very much. I think it's a great service and I am absolutely of the opinion, because now representing FIDE, not Freestyle, as I said, we can take this offline, what was done there in the past. But it's very important for FIDE to have a very good relationship with all platforms, with Chess.com, Lichess, all other platforms, and in addition to also develop their own development path for players coming from non-chess to online to offline, playing into the clubs, being rated. All of this program has to be under the FIDE umbrella so that the FIDE brand really prospers and has a benefit from it, because up to now if you look at the FIDE financial statements, the value of the brand is zero because you don't have any revenue associated with this. So yes, I'm trying to cooperate and I'm very happy when I'm elected to first sit together with you and see what Lichess and FIDE can do together.
Thank you for the answer.
This is Hemang Gorse from the ChessBase India team. My question is to both the candidates. As chess becomes more and more popular across the world and a lot of people are watching it, what are specific actions both of you will take if you become FIDE president to improve chess media, support chess content creators, and make chess broadcasts and chess videos watched much more by the general audience? Thank you.
I will direct this question to Mr. Turlov as we have one question per candidate. Thank you.
I think yes, that's the main problem on our way to become a part of the Olympic program. And I think we should now work more with visualization of the game, with different AI features to help different levels of viewers to understand the beauty of the game. And I'm sure that sometimes in this world we need to make sure that it will be a different broadcast for different levels of viewers with a different understanding of the game, and maybe for some beginners. We need to bring more colors to the board and more visualizations of potential resolution of the game. And if we will make more show, more emotions, more preparation about the game itself, so I'm sure that we should get closer to some sort of live media product, and that product can attract millions of viewers and hundreds of millions of viewers at the end of the day. I think that's a great puzzle which doesn't have a simple solution, but I will promise to work on that as hard as I can because that's, I think, one of the biggest dreams of all the chess family, to become the first sport between classic and cyber to be recognized by the Olympic Committee as a game, as a part of the summer program or something like that.
Hello, my name is Diana Bulena. I am a chess player and chess blogger. And my question is for Timur Turlov. What experience from the Kazakhstan Chess Federation would you like to bring to FIDE, and what would you do differently at the international level? Thank you.
Thank you. So I will be a new leader for FIDE with a different culture because we are all different, and I'll definitely bring a lot of new fresh blood for the middle level, for the execution level, and of course also to the senior level. I'm sure that we have to grant FIDE some sustainability because if we will make sure that FIDE will have a development budget for the next four years, we'll be able to plan ahead. We'll be able to fix the calendar for the next two years and not to be extremely dependent on last-minute decisions of sponsors about events, which also disrupts access to major sponsors. I'm sure that this steadiness and our ability to be committed to something for the long term, to have well-qualified professionals on board on different positions, especially...
On positions which are not related to professional sport — like media positions, legal positions, marketing positions, organizing positions — it definitely requires us to attract and retain great professionals. And I'm sure that if we empower the great professionals who are inside FIDE with resources, with access to that, with stability, that will change the game, and we will see an evolution of the federation. We will see how it can become much stronger. And I'm sure that we are at the right moment: if we do the right stuff, that will transform into tremendous growth in the next four years. But we have to be patient. We don't have to expect great results in the next year. We have to be prepared to work hard, as we worked in the Kazakh Chess Federation, to see visible growth, and then to make sure that we will be able to keep this growth over a long period of time.
Hi, I would like to ask a question specifically for Turlov, Mr. Turlov. And Mr. Turlov, I heard that you have a program that would provide direct support to chess and it has around a $6 million budget. Could you please share a little more information about this? And plus, one more question: I would like to ask if both candidates can comment on Mr. Rajstein not being here and what message that sends to the chess world. How do you see this? Thank you.
Well, keep it at the first question. Thank you.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. So Rajstein is restricted. Maybe someone can just ask the first question. So answering your first question, I think it's $7 million — it's 6.2 million euro — and then we added 1.5 US to media development. It's open on our website: open tournaments, travel subsidies, more access to coaching, more support for youth talents. And of course it should be more acceptable for all federations, more accessible for all federations despite their status, despite where they're located. And of course, we will help with a digital platform, with digital CRM, with more engagements, with online.
Thank you, Jafar from Prime Chess. My question is to Turlov. Obviously, big changes do take some time to implement. But within your first 100 days, what are some of the specific structural changes you'll make if you are president?
We will definitely start to hire people to fix and improve our communications, to make our governance much more transparent, to put the level of organization even higher. It's good already, and it's already a big achievement of the current FIDE administration, but we definitely, I think, invest more money into FIDE to help to run our — to be able to hire these people, to be able to start our digitalization. We will improve our software development department, our departments for PR and marketing, add them much more resources, extra personnel, make sure that we will align even closer with the International School Chess Federation. We already work very well, but I think we can continue to align this with the Chess and Schools Commission. And of course, I think I will start to take a look at what else needs adjustment, because that's a process — all the management process definitely takes some time to better understand who is who and who will be able to collaborate with each other. And of course, I will make sure that the championship match between Sindarov and Gesh is going to go well — will go well — in Geneva, and we will be able to finally realize our strategy. So I think in the next 100 days I will make sure that we will get enough resources to be able to execute our plan which was promoted.
Thank you. Good luck to both of you.
As Mr. Turlov has had a few questions in a row, I do want to circle back to ChessBase India's question for Mr. Bühner about how broadcast can be made more appealing for the everyday crowd.
Thank you. I think we have already shown it very drastically by putting on nine shows around the world which we broadcast, and we had a reach of 1.2 billion around the world — people who are interested to watch what we have done. It's all visible on freestylechess.com. You will see all of the tournaments. There are also — like, we have not sold it yet to one network, but it's on YouTube basically. You can find it. It's called Next Moves. It's three times 45 minutes about this. You will see all of the stars there. You will see the whole coverage. And so we have already shown how this broadcast is possible and also interesting. We have also gotten distributors like DAZN — I don't know if you know this here in the area of the world, but in Europe and in America it's a very big streaming service — so it was shown not only online on Twitch or chess.com, but also on DAZN, for example. So I think that is a question that I can answer easily by just demonstrating what we have done in the past, and I can just encourage everyone to see that. And my ambition is to bring this expertise, this distribution, and this access to the media world to the general chess market of FIDE.
Thank you. We have about 20 minutes left, so I would like to just ask journalists to keep their questions short and sweet. Thank you.
Hi, I have a question for Mr. Turlov. What's your plan for promoting and developing chess as a part of education worldwide?
Yes, that's my passion. I'm president of the International School Chess Federation, so that will definitely be a point for development. We'll continue to help schools and enthusiasts who implement chess in schools, and national federations, with resources, with equipment, with learning management platforms, with textbooks and video lessons, with conferences on chess and education, which really helps us to engage government officials, with international tournaments. We did continental stages this time. Maybe next time we will do some zonal stages for the Chess and School Teams Championship, and we'll continue to expand that. I think we have a lot of work to do, and I am personally very committed to travel, to speak to ministries, to country leadership, to promote this initiative. And we are very happy that I actually have a great track record on that. We already convinced some ministries to start this program, and we will be passionate enough to make sure that this program will be realized and will be delivered in those countries who adopted this strategy.
Hi everyone sitting here. My name is Misa, and now I want to take a moment to have a question for you, Mr. Bühner. And the first question is — I don't want to take too much time, sorry. The first question is: why aren't you advertising like them? They're having their own spaces, they're having their own assistance to demonstrate what kind of impact, what kind of advantages, say, FIDE is going to have in the future if they're going to become the president of FIDE. But why aren't you doing the same thing?
