Every Succession episode has the same shape: the man at the top is suddenly removed by forces beyond the family's control, an interim figure nobody voted for takes the chair, and every ambitious person in the building starts counting votes before the press release is even out. On Wednesday, world chess ran the entire arc in a single day.
The patriarch: Arkady Dvorkovich, president of FIDE since 2018, and — credit where due — the man who dragged the federation from Cold War relic to functioning sports body. On Wednesday, the EU put him on its 21st sanctions list, wedged between shadow-fleet tankers and crypto banks. He called the decision "unlawful and unfair" and vowed to fight it "by all possible means." But FIDE is registered in Switzerland, and Swiss law won't let a sanctioned person control the company — so by nightfall he suspended his own powers rather than let the federation's bank accounts freeze around him. A predecessor in the same jam once clung on for three years while FIDE lost its banking; Dvorkovich needed one evening. Even his exits are efficient.
The reluctant heir: Viswanathan Anand, 56, five-time World Champion, FIDE's Deputy President, and now — by operation of Article 19.2 of the charter, the chess equivalent of a dead man's switch — Interim President of world chess.
Anand is the first World Champion to hold the office since Max Euwe spent the 1970s talking Bobby Fischer onto airplanes, and quite possibly the only person in chess politics with no enemies, no faction, and no discernible appetite for any of this. He took the deputy job as a dignified courtesy. He has now been handed a federation, a war of lawyers, and an Olympiad, in that order.
The vote: ten weeks away. FIDE elects its president this September–October at the General Assembly in Samarkand — Silk Road city, former Timurid capital, natural habitat of dynastic intrigue — and until Wednesday the outcome was a formality. Dvorkovich had support from roughly 100 federations locked in across Africa and Asia, and no term-limit problem, because FIDE abolished term limits in 2023.
Now every one of those delegates has to answer a question with no good answer: who should they support given that Mr. Dvorkovich is not running.
And here — because chess never lets a crisis go unadorned — comes the ghost of seasons past: Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, FIDE president from 1995 to 2018, sanctioned by the U.S. in 2015, de-sanctioned in 2025, and now working the phones across Africa's 54 federations in pursuit of his old job.
Ilyumzhinov is best known outside chess for maintaining, on the record, cheerfully, for decades, that he was once taken aboard an alien spacecraft. He is, as of this week, arguably the most well-known potential candidate in the field, a sentence that should be read twice. There's also a challenger from the West — Wadim Rosenstein, a German organizer running as the reform candidate with — playing the role of the outside money guy the family never sees coming.
And then there's Jan Henric Buettner — the German entrepreneur who made his money building AOL Europe, spent it on a castle resort on the Baltic, and then co-founded Freestyle Chess with Magnus Carlsen — he is running too, with the respected English organizer Malcolm Pein on his ticket.
So: a suspended patriarch fighting for his name in court on a timeline of years, an election on a timeline of weeks, a regent beloved by everyone and coveting nothing, a returned exile with extraterrestrial references, and 200-odd federations doing the math in the corridors of Samarkand. The sanctions were supposed to be about geopolitics. What they actually did was take the sleepiest election in sports and turn it into the only one worth watching this year.
Ten weeks. One chair. Bring popcorn, and a second passport.