The next world championship

Fide’s clock was ticking, and their position looked difficult. But at last they have made their move, announcing that the next world championship match will take place in Astana, Kazakhstan with a €2 million prize fund, beginning on 7 April.

Two factors explain the delay. One was Magnus Carlsen’s abdication, announced in July last year. Ding Liren and Ian Nepomniachtchi, who qualified to contest the match, are first-rate players, but obviously less marketable than the Norwegian. The second snag was that Nepomniachtchi is Russian. Notwithstanding his explicit opposition to the war in Ukraine, his nationality narrows the field of potential sponsors, especially since Fide renounced sponsorship agreements with sanctioned or state-controlled Russian companies soon after the war began. (Historically, such companies played a significant role in funding Fide, and it is no coincidence that Fide’s president, Arkady Dvorkovich, is a former deputy prime minister of Russia).

Given this geopolitical baggage, Kazakhstan is a plausible host nation, though Fide’s director-general Emil Sutovsky noted that Argentina also put forward a strong bid. Still, Chinese and Russian fans who wish to watch the games in real time can be satisfied that Astana’s timezone is neatly sandwiched between Moscow and Beijing. As it happens, both Putin and Xi have visited the city in recent months. The prize fund (to be split 60-40) looks as healthy as could be expected, equalling that of the Carlsen-Nepomniachtchi match in Dubai 2021. The ‘General Partner’ of the event will be Freedom Holding Corp, a financial services company headquartered in Kazakhstan and listed on the Nasdaq. Timur Turlov, the company’s billionaire CEO, is a Kazakh citizen who was born in Russia and was elected president of the Kazakh chess federation earlier this month.

In recent years, Kazakhstan has hosted plenty of top international events – most recently, the world rapid and blitz championships, held in Almaty (the ‘southern capital’) in the days after Christmas.