Kazakh billionaire Timur Turlov did not set out to run world chess. In late June the founder of Freedom Holding Corp, the Nasdaq-listed financial services group, agreed to stand as deputy to Arkady Dvorkovich, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) president seeking a third term.

Then on July 23 the EU added Dvorkovich, a former first deputy prime minister in the Russian government, to its 21^st sanctions package. Dvorkovich suspended his powers within hours. Within a day the FIDE presidential ticket had reconstituted itself with the top two names exchanged: Turlov for president, and Viswanathan Anand, the five-time world champion who had become interim president, as his deputy.

That is how a 38-year-old billionaire who has been the head of the Kazakh chess association for barely three years became the frontrunner in an election to be decided on September 26, when delegates from nearly 200 national federations gather in Samarkand alongside the Chess Olympiad.

Speaking with IntelliNews by video link from Almaty, Turlov seems less interested in the timetable than in the business case. Chess, he argues, is an undervalued sponsorship market.

"Chess is also a very great club of people," he said. "A lot of chess fans are intellectual people. It's bankers, politicians, business leaders, and different artists.”

Businesses, he added, are "missing a great opportunity for sponsorship. Because with relatively small budgets, you can get a global influence.”

Turlov, who has had a rags-to-riches ride to become Kazakhstan’s wealthiest man, has bought into that thesis heavily. Freedom Holding, of which he owns roughly two-thirds, has spent more than $75mn on the game and puts in about $15mn a year. It funded the 2024 world rapid and blitz championships on Wall Street, backed successive Candidates tournaments, and in April acquired ChessBase, the Hamburg company whose databases have been the sport's professional infrastructure for four decades.

The digital pitch

What he proposes to bring to FIDE is narrower than the sponsorship argument suggests. Professional chess, he says, is governed competently; what neither FIDE nor its members capture is the value that could be created by migrating the game online. He wants to digitise chess completely.

"I think I can help with digitalization, with building a strong digital platform... to be able to regulate this digital growth," he said. Otherwise, "funding for federations never will be secured and never will be sustainable if we will not significantly present online.”

The game has already been popularised by the enormously successful “Queen’s Gambit” Netflix series and made accessible by the very popular chess.com site that is both a place to learn and a platform to compete, but Turlov wants to go further.

Pressed for specifics, he lists CRM systems for each federation, a chess ID so federations can count their players, voluntary accreditation of clubs, calendar tools, and arbiter registries. Then something harder. He wants "a very strong link between online gaming platforms and national federations", he said, "starting from building biometric identification of chess players to maintain integrity of ratings".

Neither that commitment nor the platform architecture appears in the five published pillars of his campaign, launched on August 1 under the motto "Moving Chess Forward. Together.”

·       Global Institution: Build a united, independent, transparent, and respected worldwide chess organization.

·       Digital Infrastructure: Create modern tools to help Member Federations manage tasks and share resources.

·       Financial Strength: Strengthen funds to invest more heavily in global programs, education, and events.

·       Equal Empowerment: Ensure every Member Federation has an equal voice, regardless of size or location.

·       Event Standards: Raise the quality of FIDE tournaments, increase prize funds, and expand player opportunities.

Nor does the goal he nominates when asked what would define a first term.

"We need to become an Olympic sport and I think we have a very good chance to become an Olympic sport," he said. "It's not fast, but at least I want to come as close as possible to this moment in the next four years.”

The route runs through continental competition: "We need recognition from international competition like Asian Games, European Games, Africa Games.”

The obstacle, he believes, is not participation but legibility. "Hundreds of millions of people play chess in the world and it's enough for the Olympics for sure," he said. Missing is a broadcast product non-players can follow — a problem he thinks artificial intelligence can solve. "Sometimes to really understand all beauty you need to be at least a master to understand the beauty of grandmasters," he told IntelliNews. "With the help of AI... we can build broadcasts more attractive for the general public.”

His reference point throughout is the Freedom super-app, his company’s flagship product, which bundles banking, insurance, travel and groceries for more than 11mn customers, and which he describes in the same terms he uses for governing a sport.

"Each big organization is kind of similar sometimes even to a small country," he said. In chess, that means embedding the game in other people's platforms. Asked, half in jest, whether customers might one day solve chess puzzles to pay for things, he did not hesitate. "Yes, why not? You can give some gigabytes for solving puzzles, some extra internet, some extra engagement.”

He would supply federations with a software development kit for such deals and warns those that ignore digital: "They will lose authority over this game.”

Continuity, and its price

Turlov's rivals for FIDE’s top job — the German entrepreneurs Jan Henric Buettner, running with Malcolm Pein, and Wadim Rosenstein, running with Gordon Tang — are campaigning against precisely what he represents. His is substantially the Dvorkovich machine with the names reordered, and he does not disown it: his letter to member federations offered "continuity with a new level of practical effectiveness".

Asked to assess his predecessor, he was warm. "I still truly believe that Arkady did a great job... He spent most of his life in the airplane," he said. "It will be, in my opinion, very unfair to not appreciate what was done.”

The criticism is oblique — "I think there were some limits in collaboration also, especially last four years" — and the gap he identifies is technical: "the biggest sphere for advancement, in my opinion, is, of course, this digital development.”

And then there is the money. Turlov is worth an estimated $7bn and he intends to personally fund some of his prospective projects.

"My key is to provide some financial backstop to FIDE, to make sure that we will be able to plan a longer calendar, for example, for the next two years," he said. "That happens not just because of a lack of professionals. That happens because of a lack of predictability.”

He names two relationships he would try to repair: "We'll still have a great potential to restart some relationship with the Ukraine Federation, for example, with the American Federation.”

The Russia question

Moscow-born, Turlov renounced his Russian citizenship in 2022 and became a Kazakh citizen; Freedom sold its Russian subsidiaries the following year. The Russian Chess Federation, itself suspended, endorsed not him but Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a Russian oligarch and chess fanatic. His first act after being elected President of the Republic of Kalmykia was to make chess a compulsory part of the school curriculum in the region, which he claims increased pupil’s academic performance by 40%. He is also a former president of FIDE, but eventually failed to file his candidature for the job.

Turlov describes himself as a Kazakh but nonetheless expects the association with Russia to stick.

"I regret very much about this situation with Russia," he said. "But it's still extremely difficult to fully distinguish sport from politics.” However, he is specific on one key condition: "I think one of them is very important to stop this war.” Asked directly whether he worries about being characterised as Kremlin-influenced, he did not address the charge.

The race for the presidency has meanwhile turned acrimonious. On August 7 Buettner sent the FIDE Council a cease-and-desist notice alleging federation staff and funds were being used to support Turlov, citing activity in Cape Town, Bucharest and Addis Ababa, and demanding written confirmation of neutrality within seven days. Neither side had responded publicly at the time of writing.

Turlov carries other baggage: Ukraine sanctioned him personally in October 2022, a listing Freedom calls an error, and in March the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued a Wells Notice to the company and to him as chief executive. But no court has ruled against him, he denies any wrongdoing and he has not been sanctioned by either the EU or America.

Bank first, federation second

Turlov’s day job continues, building one of the fastest growing fintech businesses in Central Asia, which is rapidly emerging as an innovative  tech hub. Freedom Holding is already moving out of its traditional stamping ground and has filed a banking application with France's ACPR as well as clearing the purchase of a small Turkish bank "I truly believe that now I will be much more useful for any society and for any country as a businessman," he said. "And frankly, I will be much freer in my decisions.”

His pitch to delegates rests on delivery. "If we're promising something, we are from business, we are not from politics. We know how important it is to deliver what was promised," he said. Being unfamiliar to the chess world he casts as an asset: "I hope that I still will be able to surprise many delegates... Sometimes it's better to talk than not to talk.”

Asked what chess has taught him that he expects to use in Samarkand, he offered something closer to a warning to himself. "In management, especially for organizations like FIDE, your mistakes are usually in relationships with different people," he said. "A lot of chess players actually don't care so much about relationships... But in federation, you need to be focused on relationships. That's all we do.”

"Mistakes could not be just factual," he added. "Mistakes also could be in your relationships. And also if you're tired and sick, so don't clash with your people, with your friends, with your colleagues, with your community.”