It’s been nearly two months since Timur Turlov was elected FIDE president in Samarkand, in an acrimonious battle for the top job against Wadim Rosenstein and Jan Henric Buettner. Turlov beat Rosenstein 110-85 in a second round after Buettner went out in the first. The Turlov administration has already started changing the way FIDE is structured. Turlov has also identified a few top priorities for the global governing body of chess in the coming months: a long-term chess calendar announced in advance; online chess championships; and FIDE broadcasts that appeal to audiences who know the basics of chess but don’t necessarily understand the complexity of the sport at the grandmaster level.Turlov said that one of his personal KPIs as FIDE president would be to leverage his existing partnerships with Bank of New York, City Bank, Nvidia and even Chinese organisations like Alibaba and Tencent to sponsor prestigious chess tournaments that FIDE organises.Turlov said that FIDE was planning to firm up and announce a chess calendar for the next two years by January, which will help bring that sort of sponsor on board. Currently, FIDE usually announces host cities for events a few months in advance. For example, Geneva was announced as the battleground for the Gukesh vs Javokhir Sindarov World Chess Championship clash in July this year, just four months in advance.Also Read | I see Total Chess as training for World Championship: Vaishali Rameshbabu“That was definitely one of the problems, but that’s not because of a management failure. That’s because of a finance failure. Sometimes it’s extremely difficult to arrange an agreement (with sponsors). I want to ensure that even if we are not able to secure commercial sponsorship for events, we will still schedule the event and we will sponsor the events ourselves. I’m sure that this cleanup will help us attract much bigger contracts from sponsors at the end of the day,” Turlov told journalists from India on the sidelines of the Total Chess pilot event in Budapest on Tuesday evening, after making the ceremonial first move.Turlov said that FIDE would focus on using AI to make elite chess easier to understand for those who already know the basics of the sport. He said a team in FIDE is already working on making broadcasts more appealing and interactive for amateurs rated below 1000.“We want to bring to the fore how grandmasters are thinking and what’s the complexity of the problems they are facing when deciding a move,” said the 38-year-old Turlov, who is also the founder, CEO and majority shareholder of Freedom Holding Corp, an investment company that started out of Kazakhstan but is now listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.Also Read | 100 chess GMs for India but for most, real test of wits begins after the title“Hundreds of millions of people play chess. It’s not about making a chess broadcast interesting to people who don’t play chess. We want to make chess broadcasts interesting for those people who have an Elo rating below 1000. There are a lot of people who have such low ratings and they don’t understand all the beauty of the game played by grandmasters. If we solve this problem and make elite chess attractive to them, that will dramatically change the commercial landscape of chess. We don’t want to just focus on chess enthusiasts, who are relatively few in numbers. We will be focused on hundreds of millions of people who know how to play chess even if they are very weak. A majority of football fans also can’t play football well enough. But they still watch football matches on their screens,” said Turlov.Story continues below this adThe third immediate priority for Turlov is for FIDE to work more on online chess tournaments. Currently, FIDE has a very limited stake in online events, with the popular chess app Chess.com hosting online events like the Speed Chess Championship.“99 per cent of chess games are already being played online, even by professional players. We definitely cannot ignore that anymore. Otherwise, we will have a different ruler and different regulator of chess very, very soon. And that will be just commercial platforms. I really believe that there should be some balance between commercial platforms and sports federations, who actually should protect the game and develop the game,” said Turlov.Also Read | Why even Magnus Carlsen isn’t favourite in treacherous Total Chess pilot eventAsked if this means that FIDE will be bringing independent operators like Chess.com under the FIDE umbrella, Turlov said: “That’s a difficult question because that will depend on our negotiations with them. I hope that we will find the right balance between us, to organise FIDE online events and make Chess.com one of our partners. But it would also mean respect for FIDE’s ability to run online events on a different platform.”(The writer is in Budapest at the invitation of Total Chess)