Before the vote for the next president of the International Chess Federation China Daily published an extended piece on Timur Turlov, founder of Freedom Holding Corp. and head of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation. At the close of the campaign, the newspaper looks past the businessman’s biography and focuses instead on the method he intends to carry over from finance into sport. The ballot takes place on September 26 in Samarkand, and by that date, the authors argue, the candidate holds something contenders for posts like this rarely have. A working model of what he promises to build.
How Turlov’s Business Experience Could Transform FIDE
Treating Turlov’s campaign as an expensive hobby of a financier means missing the point of his offer, China Daily said. Freedom Finance, the brokerage Turlov set up in 2008, has grown over eighteen years into a group listed on Nasdaq since 2019 that brings together a bank, insurance, payments, telecoms and lifestyle services. Scattered products, users and services are tied here into a single ecosystem. That same logic, the paper writes, is what the 38-year-old entrepreneur wants to apply to a global sport.
Chess, as China Daily sees it, suffers from the same condition the financial market had before ecosystems emerged: many participants and services, few links between them. A FIDE profile, online platforms, tournament sign-ups, federations, coaches, and a player keeps a separate account for each. Turlov’s answer closely mirrors the Freedom SuperApp model: one FIDE digital account that gathers a player’s rating, results, tournament record and achievements, along with entry to competitions and learning materials. Artificial intelligence in this design handles game analysis, coaching support and fair-play control. The federation then stops being merely a regulator and organizer and becomes a service platform for the entire chess world.
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The Kazakhstan Template
One argument the paper comes back to repeatedly: Timur Turlov does not describe the future, he points to what has already been done. He took over the Kazakhstan federation in January 2023, the same year the government adopted a chess development plan through 2027. Federation branches opened in all 20 regions of the country. The number of tournaments entered into international databases climbed from 1,538 in 2023 to 3,853 in 2025. The Chess in Education program has reached fifteen hundred schools and roughly 60,000 children, with about 2,800 teachers trained. Kazakh players collected 126 medals at official international events in 2023 and 162 in 2025, and in 2024 the women’s team brought home the country’s first Olympiad silver.
Beyond that, Freedom Holding Corp. is present in more than 20 countries; in Europe the group has over 600,000 clients and intends to secure a banking license there. In Turkey the holding recently obtained a brokerage license, the first broad license of its kind issued to a foreign company in 34 years, and opened a bank of its own.
Children as Strategy
The second word that, China Daily notes, keeps surfacing in Turlov’s program, and one that sounds far less corporate than “ecosystem,” is children. In 2024 the International School Chess Federation was created, with Turlov himself at its head. Its purpose is to link national federations with schools, universities, teachers and education systems. In 2025 it partnered with FIDE on the World Schools Team Championship and an education summit in Washington, after which the two bodies designated 2026 the Year of Chess in Education.
The social rationale here outweighs the sporting one: bringing chess into schools at low cost opens the game to children from families where nobody would otherwise have come near a board. Champions produce stars and elite events draw spectators, yet the mass base of any sport starts with a child sitting down at a chessboard for the first time. That child will most likely never turn professional, but may well become a coach, an organizer, an amateur, or simply someone who hands the game on to the next generation.
Hence the campaign’s emphasis on smaller federations. FIDE, in Turlov’s view, should not hand out grants but equip federations with technology, educational products and commercial tools so they can earn on their own. At the first presidential debate on September 9 he added to this a development fund of more than $6 million for national federations, above all those with modest means: for open tournaments, arbiter and coach training, and players’ participation in events at home and abroad.
A Third Scale-Up
FIDE dates back to 1924, and today it has to compete with video games, esports and short-form video, even though online platforms have drawn a new audience to chess. Turlov’s answer, as China Daily frames it, is borrowed from fintech: digitalization, platforms, ecosystems and scale. The ticket’s second name, five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand, adds experience and standing to that. Technology and business paired with chess tradition.
The candidate, the paper concludes, already has two scale-up cases to his name: Freedom Holding, which went from a regional brokerage to an international financial group, and Kazakh chess, where in three years everything grew, from tournament counts to school programs. Samarkand will be his attempt at a third, this time with an organization more than a century old. The federations will decide by secret ballot, one vote each.
What the Article Leaves Out
A few facts absent from the China Daily piece round out the picture. Under the FIDE list dated September 14, 202 national federations are entitled to vote on September 26, and the General Assembly itself is held on the sidelines of the 46th Chess Olympiad, which has brought a record 396 teams to Samarkand. The technology plank of Timur Turlov’s program rests on a tangible asset: in April 2026 Freedom Holding Corp. acquired Hamburg-based ChessBase, a games database and playing server with nearly forty years of history, and plans to invest around €5 million in the platform. Major events under Timur Turlov’s patronage are nothing new either: the 2023 World Championship match between Ding Liren and Ian Nepomniachtchi opened in Astana, and the 2024 World Rapid and Blitz Championships in New York were held with Freedom as title sponsor.
