Anish Giri Asks FIDE to Pay for Its Own Circuit
The request was concrete: a prize fund for the top three or top five finishers of the FIDE Circuit. A grown international federation, headquartered in Switzerland, awarding prize money to the winners of its own qualifying event.
For the uninitiated: the FIDE Circuit is the back door to the Candidates Tournament, which is the event that picks the challenger for the world championship. Win the circuit, get a Candidates seat.
It is, on paper, the second-most valuable thing a player can win in a calendar year. In practice, it is a spreadsheet. FIDE did not organize the tournaments that feed into it. FIDE did not put up their prize funds. FIDE identified some tournaments that were already happening, added them together, and announced a winner. The tournaments do the work. FIDE does the branding. Giri would like FIDE to also do something.
His analogy for this was that it's what ChessBase India would be doing if it declared every chess video on YouTube part of a "ChessBase India Circuit." You can say the words. It does not make them a thing.
He had a workable suggestion, in all fairness, easier said than done: sell the naming rights. Coca-Cola Circuit, if Coca-Cola pays. Naming rights are a real revenue line in real sports.
The best part of the interview was Giri describing what happened when the circuit launched. Organizers clocked, quickly, that FIDE had handed them a coupon. Invitations went out to elite grandmasters offering no appearance fee, no prize fund worth the flight, and the warm promise of circuit points — on the theory that Candidates qualification is a sufficiently desperate ambition that a top-20 player might show up to an open in a business park for it. It sometimes worked. Giri named the Chennai Masters as the one that did it properly — real money, a modest discount against what players get at the Grand Chess Tour, a fair deal between adults.
The hidden cost, and the one that should worry FIDE more than Giri saying any of this out loud, is the calendar. To chase circuit points you skip the World Rapid and Blitz, where there is cash and a trophy and an audience, to play classical tournaments where there is a participation certificate. If you win the circuit, the math works out. If you finish second, you have spent a year as unpaid labor in a branding exercise and missed the events that would have paid your rent. Third place is a charitable donation with extra steps.
Giri concluded by announcing his hypothetical candidacy for FIDE president and noting that he would want the infrastructure working before he took office, because the current version is clearly not ready for him. Very funny, Anish! It also, incidentally, aired in a year when FIDE is actually holding a presidential election, which means the incumbent's flagship qualifying program has now been publicly described as an unpaid invoice by one of the top ten most recognizable players in the world.