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South Africa might not have stayed in the knockout round of the Fifa World Cup for as long as many would have liked, but others are optimistic about grooming the country to dominate in a different competitive pursuit.Russian-born Kazakhstani entrepreneur, financier and CEO of Freedom Holding Corp Timur Turlov told Business Times that his company’s acquisition of German chess software and database company ChessBase in April was a move aimed at sustaining chess culture and growing it in Africa.“That’s a brilliant company with brilliant people, and we want, of course, to save this culture and technology, which they already have,” he said. “And we want to help them to bring more investments to that company ... [and] more new people to the development team.“We already helped them to adopt a platform for macros and to adopt a platform for smartphones, and I truly believe that ChessBase should become mobile-first in their main professional products, but we also need to develop a lot of products for more mature players.”Turlov said that since the acquisition, Freedom Holding Corp has already started integrating ChessBase and its own Freedom SuperApp in Kazakhstan. “For example, to let users of our digital ecosystem also access chess broadcasts, chess gaming platforms and some educational features, to access training materials like chess puzzles and also to be integrated with some financial incentives.“For example, if you solve a lot of puzzles and you do a lot of games, you can get some financial rewards inside our platform. And we can also incentivise people to solve more puzzles, to grow their rating, and if they’re achieving some good results, we can invite them to some open competitions, some amateur competitions, some offline chess clubs.”He said he hoped to empower all chess federations and national bodies with a nonprofit platform, and that he was sure that ChessBase had great potential in its initiative to contribute to preserving and growing chess culture.“I hope that ChessBase itself will be a great platform for us, not just for commercial development and for the professional chess audience, which we will continue to foster, but we also want to create a very strong partner of FIDE [the International Chess Federation] in general.“[We want] to use the ChessBase knowledge to help to digitalise FIDE and national chess federations, starting from the South African federation to all the rest of the federations of the world, using some AI features of chess-based educational features, gaming platform features, and anti-cheat features,” Turlov said.Arkady Dvorkovich, the Russian politician and economist currently serving as the president of FIDE, said the resurgence of chess’s popularity in pop culture made it an ideal time to merge technology with the game to take its culture to new markets.“What is happening right now is that online chess became a great element of the overall chess community, especially during the pandemic, when people started playing chess while quarantined at home,” he said.“They started using online platforms to play chess more and more. And that was inspired also by Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit series. And we can see that now, I think, dozens of millions of people are playing online regularly.”Dvorkovich said the only reason the market did not have more official online events for chess was due to the risk of competitors cheating using new forms of technology, such as computer assistants, to win.“Since computers, AI-based algorithms play better than human beings. The second trend is faster chess. So, using time controls that [don’t take] as much time as classical chess. When I was a kid, players spent six to seven hours a day, [and] some of the games were adjourned to the next day.”He said while the opportunities for online and digital platforms to increase access to chess were apparent, digital technology has spent much of its existence being a threat to the integrity of the game.“I think … federations across the world feel that they can lose control over their base; shifting to online and trying to establish a new base in schools is the most important field here, since you have the largest possible cohort of young people who can enter the chess world.”Dvorkovich said FIDE is in discussions with national chess committees about initiatives and events that have the potential to create a big boost to chess in Africa.Business Times
