Ideas, Openings & Improvement

One roundup, every storyline behind July's FIDE list: who climbed, who dropped, and the two tournaments that drove nearly all of it.

A Kazakhstan-based billionaire just switched from running for FIDE deputy to running for the top job, with a five-time World Champion as his running mate.

A Hungarian election most chess fans never noticed is the reason FIDE's president had to suspend himself. Here is the full chain of events.

The road to the 2028 Candidates just got longer and stricter. Here is exactly how the new two-year FIDE Circuit counts your results.

Dvorkovich did not resign, he suspended himself. Here is the procedural difference, why it matters, and who is actually running FIDE right now.

World chess ran without a single governing body for over a century after its first recognisable clubs. Here is the week in 1924 Paris that finally changed that.

Five bullet points, everything that changed in the 2027 FIDE World Cup format, no backstory required.

The World Cup grew too long to fit the calendar, so FIDE rebuilt it from the ground up. Here is exactly what changes in 2027, and why.

One disputed venue announcement. Two rival "World Champions." Thirteen years before anyone managed to put the title back together.

Kazakhstan Chess Federation. A FIDE development subsidiary. ChessBase. A FIDE presidential run. One person, four years, presented evenhandedly.

Thirty-six years after the informal legend, FIDE finally made "Grandmaster" an actual title, and had to decide who among chess history's best had earned it retroactively.

A Hungarian-American physics professor built a rating system in his spare time. Sixty years later it rates chess players, footballers, and esports competitors alike.