A Letter From January Complicates FIDE's Account of Israel's Olympiad Forfeits
By Douglas C. · Tue, 22 Sep 2026
Israel's two Olympiad teams had their round six games forfeited this week after a Yom Kippur scheduling request couldn't be resolved with that round's opponents. A letter that's now surfaced, dated eight months before the tournament even began, suggests it never should have come down to that negotiation in the first place.
Israel's two Olympiad teams had their round six games forfeited this week after a Yom Kippur scheduling request couldn't be resolved with that round's opponents. A letter that's now surfaced, dated eight months before the tournament even began, suggests it never should have come down to that negotiation in the first place.What the letter saysThe letter, dated January 15, 2026, is signed by FIDE Legal Director Aleksandr Martynov and addressed to the Israeli Chess Federation. In it, FIDE confirms it would adjust the Israeli teams' Olympiad schedule specifically around Yom Kippur: games on September 20 would be ended by 17:00 local time, and games on September 21 would start no earlier than 19:30. FIDE's stated reasoning cited the Israeli federation's "significant contribution to the development of world chess" and "the importance of the participation of the Israeli teams in the Olympiad." It's a clear, written, months-in-advance commitment, not an informal understanding.What actually happened when September 21 arrivedRound six was scheduled for its standard 15:00 start on September 21, the exact date FIDE's own letter had promised would begin no earlier than 19:30. Instead of that promise being reflected in the tournament's official schedule, Israel found itself needing to negotiate directly with its round six opponents for a late start or a shift to the rest day, the same process any team without a prior written commitment would have had to go through. This time, the opponents declined, which they were entitled to do, and Israel's games were forfeited. The Open section result was a clean 4-0 loss to the Netherlands.The gap nobody's explained yetThe core problem here isn't that FIDE's scheduling system failed to satisfy every team's preference, it's that a specific, written commitment appears to have simply not made it into the actual tournament schedule. Nothing in what's public so far explains whether that was an administrative oversight, a breakdown between FIDE's legal department and whoever built the round-by-round schedule, or something else entirely. Ukrainian grandmaster Mikhail Golubev, who shared the letter publicly, called it evidence of what he sees as broader "crazy and irresponsible" organization on FIDE's part, a characterization worth noting as his own reaction rather than a settled account of what went wrong.Why it matters beyond one roundIsrael's teams had been performing well through the tournament's early rounds, so the forfeits carry a real competitive cost, not just a symbolic one. But the more significant issue is what this implies about how FIDE tracks and honors its own written commitments to member federations. A promise made on FIDE letterhead in January, one specific enough to name exact times and dates, apparently wasn't carried through into the schedule those same dates were built around eight months later. That's a process failure independent of who was ultimately at fault for the round six pairing itself declining to accommodate a request that, by rights, shouldn't have needed to be requested again at all.