Timur Turlov on Chess as a Business: Sponsors, IDs, Olympics

In an interview with American Chess Magazine, conducted by video link in early August before the vote and republished by ChessBase, Timur Turlov described chess as “massively undervalued”. He has since been elected FIDE president, so the conversation now reads as a statement of intent from the man in charge.

What stands out is how little he hides the commercial logic. Chess, he argued, attracts “bankers, politicians, business leaders, different artists,” and sponsors can buy “global influence” with “relatively small budgets.” He still put passion and charity first, calling the marketing a “side effect,” though he admitted chess “opened a lot of doors in the banking world.”

A trader’s route to the board

Turlov was born in 1987 in Lobnya, near Moscow, and opened his first brokerage account at about fourteen with roughly $800 inherited from his grandfather. He lost most of it. After his bank employer collapsed in 2008, he and six colleagues pooled about $100,000 in severance, and that firm became Freedom Holding.

Freedom listed on Nasdaq in October 2019 and reported revenue of $2.19 billion for the year ended March 2026. Its sponsorship of FIDE’s world title events was already in place before he ran. Companies tied to him have put more than $75mn into the game, at a rate he has put at $10mn to $20mn a year.

The platform pitch

His diagnosis is that FIDE runs the professional game well but captures almost none of the value created online. “Funding for federations will never be secure or sustainable unless we have a much stronger presence online,” he said. His fix is a shared digital layer for 200 federations: CRM systems, a chess ID modeled on KazChess ID, voluntary club accreditation, arbiter registries and performance tracking.

The boldest line was about fair play. He wants a “very strong link between online gaming platforms and national federations,” beginning with biometric identification to protect ratings. He gave no detail on what would be collected, who would hold it, or whether the major platforms are on board, and no other candidate proposed anything similar.

Olympics and a financial backstop

The Olympics were absent from the five pillars his campaign published on August 1, yet he raised them unprompted. “I want to come as close as possible to this moment in the next four years,” he said. The route runs through recognition at the Asian, European and African Games.

His view is that chess has the players but not the spectators. He wants AI-assisted broadcasts, including “some beautiful animation of different lines,” and says a research group is already working on it.

Perhaps the most practical promise is money with a longer horizon. He wants to underwrite FIDE so events can be scheduled two years out, arguing the problem is “lack of predictability” rather than lack of staff. Federations, he added, would get a software kit to strike deals with banks or telecoms, even trading puzzle-solving for extra data.

The ChessBase conflict question

Freedom bought ChessBase in April with about €5mn of committed investment. Headquarters stay in Hamburg, the management team stays, and no job cuts are planned. The interview was republished on that very site, which is a fact readers should weigh, and the same entanglement of sponsor, owner and federation head will follow him in office.

He also conceded that the model rests on Kazakh conditions: a strong national digital ID and 85% cashless payments. He did not say how it would work in federations without either.

Schools as the base of the pyramid

Turlov is president of the International School Chess Federation, which FIDE’s General Assembly approved at his proposal. At home his schools program covers more than 1,500 schools and over 60,000 children. “Chess in school programs is not just to make grandmasters,” he said.

What he says he learned

Asked what chess taught him, Turlov said a year earlier he talked about not deciding when tired. This summer his answer was about people. “Your mistakes are usually in your relationships,” he said, adding that players focus on results while a federation head must focus on relationships. His first test is whether 200 federations accept a platform built on that premise.