No First-Round Knockout: Turlov and Rosenstein Head to a Runoff
By Douglas C. · Sat, 26 Sep 2026
FIDE's presidential election didn't end on the first ballot. With 192 votes cast in Samarkand on Saturday, Timur Turlov topped the field with 96, Wadim Rosenstein took 76, and Jan Henric Buettner trailed with 20. None of the three tickets cleared the majority needed to win outright, so the congress moves to a second round between the top two finishers: Turlov and Rosenstein.
FIDE's presidential election didn't end on the first ballot. With 192 votes cast in Samarkand on Saturday, Timur Turlov topped the field with 96, Wadim Rosenstein took 76, and Jan Henric Buettner trailed with 20. None of the three tickets cleared the majority needed to win outright, so the congress moves to a second round between the top two finishers: Turlov and Rosenstein.Buettner's elimination ends a campaign that, running alongside council candidate Malcolm Pein, had positioned itself as the accountability ticket in a three-way race increasingly defined by allegations against the other two camps. Twenty votes, just over a tenth of the delegates in the room, is a modest return given how much attention the Buettner-Pein campaign generated in the closing weeks, from its "A Strong FIDE" messaging to Pein's public sparring over visa denials and continental federation politics. Where those twenty votes go in the runoff, and whether Buettner and Pein issue any kind of endorsement, is now one of the more consequential open questions in the room.The math delegates are about to doA runoff between two candidates is simple arithmetic on paper: whoever picks up more of Buettner's 20 votes, plus whatever undecided or abstaining delegates return for round two, wins. Turlov needs to hold serve rather than expand his coalition much further, entering the second round already 20 votes clear of a majority of the 192 cast. Rosenstein needs to consolidate close to all of the Buettner bloc just to draw level, and more than that to actually overtake.That math arrives against the backdrop of a campaign that has been unusually adversarial for a FIDE election. Turlov heads into the runoff still carrying the questions this outlet and others have raised about Freedom Holding's regulatory history, the governance vacuum around his International School Chess Federation, and his campaign's handling of critics like David Llada. Rosenstein spent the final stretch of the campaign talking about a very different FIDE, one where his pledged ten million euros flows to national federations, chess management gets professionalized, and, in his words to El País earlier this week, delegates get the chance to show the world that "chess is a joy." Whether either message did more to move undecided delegates than the sheer weight of Turlov's financial backing and organizational reach will only become clear once the runoff votes are counted.What happens nextFIDE's own announcement gives no runoff date beyond confirming the second round will happen, but with the congress already underway in Samarkand and the Olympiad itself entering its final rounds, delegates won't have long to make up their minds. A result that looked close to decided a week ago, with Turlov the heavy favorite and Rosenstein positioned as the closest challenger, is now down to a single vote between two candidates and whatever the Buettner bloc decides to do with the influence it just gained by finishing third.