The World Rapid and Blitz is going to Istanbul. The title sponsor is the FIDE President.
Freedom Holding, whose founder Timur Turlov took over FIDE five weeks ago, is paying for the year-end championship. This is how chess gets funded now, and it works, kind of.
The 2026 FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Championships will be held in Istanbul from December 25 to 30, FIDE announced on Thursday. Four titles are at stake: Open and Women’s, Rapid and Blitz. Venue, regulations and registration details are to follow.
The title sponsor is Freedom Holding Corp. Its founder and chief executive, Timur Turlov, was elected FIDE President in Samarkand on September 26, beating Wadim Rosenstein 110 to 85. So the man who runs the federation is also the man writing the cheque for its last world championship of the year.
That’s an expected arrangement. Chess has spent a century looking for a patron and mostly finding governments, oligarchs and, for long stretches, nobody. Turlov has put more than $30 million into Kazakhstan chess since 2023, bought ChessBase in the spring, and under the 2026 agreement Freedom also funds the Candidates, the World Championship match, training centres, school programmes and talent scouting. The alternative to the President sponsoring the Rapid and Blitz is not a neutral sponsor. The alternative is the 1990s.
The arrangement is also entirely in the open. Freedom has been FIDE’s strategic partner since 2023. Turlov ran on it. The federations voted for it. The only thing that changed in Samarkand is the signature on the thank-you note, which this week he wrote to himself, via the Turkish Chess Federation.
Istanbul last hosted a major FIDE event in December 2025, the World Youth Rapid and Blitz, and staged the Chess Olympiad in 2012. Türkiye has a case beyond the airport: chess has been in the school system for years, and the country has two of the most watched teenagers in the game, Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş and Ediz Gürel.
The defending champions are Magnus Carlsen, who took both open titles in Doha last year, Aleksandra Goryachkina in women’s rapid and Bibisara Assaubayeva in women’s blitz. Assaubayeva plays for Kazakhstan. Her federation president is also sponsoring the event. That is not a conflict either. That is a country that decided chess was worth money and is now collecting.
