The Empty Board in Samarkand: Yom Kippur, the Clock, and Two Teams Who Never Met

The cameraman stood at the entrance to the playing hall of the 2026 World Chess Olympiad in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and captured a frame that probably no one wants in the tournament's memory album: the Dutch team walking in, jackets still carrying the morning chill, pulling out chairs, setting clocks, opening boards — and on the opposite side, Israel's seat empty. Not a single piece was touched. Not a single move was written into the scoresheet. The arbiter simply wrote down the two words that mean a loss by forfeit, and two full points flowed toward the Netherlands without a single tense minute ever being played on the board. In the women's hall, a few rows away, Bulgaria received exactly the same gift: Israel's women's team was absent too. One morning, two boards, four points awarded by pen instead of by intellect. Among all the numbers dancing across the standings of the planet's biggest event for a mental sport, there is a silence that no electronic scoreboard can display. I kept thinking back to Sunday evening, 20 September 2026. Back then, everything still felt soft. Singapore's open team and Colombia's women's team had agreed to let the Israeli players start their fifth-round games one hour and fifteen minutes earlier than the official schedule. The organisers moved those two pairings to the Savitsky Hotel so the Israeli players could finish before sundown. Nobody complained. Nobody demanded anything. It was just a small concession, enough for a person to keep their faith intact while still sitting in the seat they were meant to sit in at the board. Then came Monday, 21 September, and the picture changed colour entirely. Both Israeli teams, men and women, failed to appear for round six. We need to lay out the context clearly before getting into the analysis, because every argument that followed revolved around one very specific question: who has the right to do what, and how far that right extends. Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish year. In 2026, the observance begins at sundown on 20 September and ends at nightfall on 21 September. During that window, those observing abstain from food, from drink, from work, and from acts considered creative or world-altering. For a chess player, the issue is not whether moving a piece counts as labour. The issue is that one must sit still. No phone. No pen. No calculation. No contest. Only stillness before the sacred. The 2026 Chess Olympiad is being held in Samarkand, an ancient city on the Silk Road that was once an astronomical and mathematical centre of the medieval Islamic world. The event gathers hundreds of national and territorial teams in an eleven-round Swiss system, four boards per match. The open section and the women's section run in parallel. The official rest day fell on Tuesday, 22 September. It is a small detail that later became the centre of the entire story. Round five was played on Sunday. Round six was played on Monday. And this year, Yom Kippur landed on both of those days. Before round five, the Israeli delegation filed a formal request with FIDE, the world chess governing body, asking to play earlier so they could finish before sundown. FIDE contacted the opponents. Singapore's open team and Colombia's women's team agreed. The games were moved to the Savitsky Hotel, starting one hour and fifteen minutes earlier. The result: the Israeli players showed up, sat down, played chess, and still made it back to their observance in time. Before round six, the delegation filed a new request. Two options were offered: either a later start, from 19:30 local time onward, or moving the games entirely to Tuesday, 22 September, the official rest day of the Olympiad. This time, FIDE contacted the opponents. The Netherlands in the open section and Bulgaria in the women's section. Both declined. A FIDE spokesperson later issued a clarification: due to the observance of Yom Kippur on 20 and 21 September, the Israeli open and women's teams had requested adjustments to their playing schedule; in round five, they needed to complete their games earlier than the standard schedule would normally allow; in round six, they requested either a later evening start of 19:30 or later, or a move to 22 September, the scheduled rest day. Regarding round six, FIDE contacted the opponents of both Israeli teams, and unlike in the previous round, neither opponent agreed to play at a different time from the official schedule. The statement closed with one short line: they are fully entitled to decline such a request. And so both Israeli teams were forfeited. The Netherlands and Bulgaria collected full points without playing a single move. This is where I have to talk about the cost. In the open section, Israel were seeded twenty-second and were ranked twenty-second after winning four of their five games. In the women's section, also seeded twenty-second, they were ranked twentieth with a similar score. In other words, both teams were exactly where their coaching staff hoped they would be, holding their rhythm, accumulating points in the middle phase of an eleven-round Swiss event — the phase where every point carries double its normal weight. Then they lost two points in a single morning, not because they were beaten by a stronger opponent, but because they were not there. In the Swiss system, points do not only determine final ranking. They determine who you face next. Dropping points in round six means falling into a weaker pairing group, which means losing the chance to face strong teams and build tiebreak value, which means a domino chain no one can reverse-engineer to know the true damage. An empty board is not just an empty board. It is a crack running through the rest of the tournament. I once spent sixty days living with old footage during the pandemic in 2026. Sixty days listening to recordings, I imagined the roar of empty seats. That feeling came back when I read the dispatches from Samarkand. A full hall, a board set in the right place, a clock already started — and half the chess world on the other side of the board simply not existing. But the better question, and the more uncomfortable one, is this: was any of it actually unfair? FIDE answered that question on everyone's behalf. Rules are rules. The Netherlands and Bulgaria had the right to decline. No clause in the regulations obliges a team to change its playing time because of an opponent's religious observance. FIDE did its job correctly: it received the request, contacted both sides, recorded the refusal, and awarded the points according to the rules. So where is the dispute? I think it lies somewhere else, not with the Netherlands and Bulgaria. Look at the asymmetry between the two rounds. In round five, the request was to shift the start earlier by one hour and fifteen minutes, with the games moved to another venue in the same city. That is a logistical change, but it does not break the structure of the playing day. Players still wake up, still eat breakfast, still prepare mentally, still play, and still have an entire evening ahead of them. In round six, the second option — moving to the rest day — breaks that structure completely. A team must play on a day it was told it could rest. Coaches must reshuffle their entire recovery plan. Players must shift their circadian rhythm, their training schedule, even how they had prepared for a blank day. And if that team has an important match the following day, the rescheduled game can become a compounded disadvantage. Declining also has its own logic. That is something I have to concede, even though my sympathies lean the other way. But if declining has its logic, then scheduling must have its logic too. And this is the blind spot I want to name. Yom Kippur fell on 20 and 21 September 2026. That is a fact that can be looked up decades, even centuries, in advance, because the Hebrew calendar is a fixed computational system. Nobody was surprised. Nobody can claim they did not know. Meanwhile, the Chess Olympiad schedule is decided by FIDE, usually long in advance, after a bidding process among host nations. The rest day — in this case Tuesday, 22 September — is also chosen by FIDE. And had that rest day been placed on Monday, 21 September, the entire story could have ended differently: the Israeli players rest on their holy day, the Netherlands and Bulgaria take their rest day as planned, and nobody has to decline anybody. In other words, a small administrative decision, made months earlier, pushed the responsibility onto the teams. FIDE did not solve the problem at the level of the calendar; FIDE moved it down to the level of relations between teams. And once a problem sits at the level of relations, it becomes a story about individual goodwill — something that cannot be standardised, cannot be regulated, cannot be guaranteed. This is the blind spot of the collective memory around this story. We tend to look at a forfeit like this and immediately go hunting for the guilty party. The Netherlands lacked goodwill? Bulgaria was selfish? Israel was rigid? FIDE was irresponsible? Each of those assignments gives us a tidy answer, and each tidy answer hides a more complicated truth: the system is designed to minimise complexity, and when complexity shows up, it has nowhere to go. I have worked as a chess commentator for a long time. Years ago, when I was calling classic finals, I learned something I have carried with me far beyond chess: sometimes a game is not decided by the best move, but by the best-timed move. Timing is a piece. And in the Samarkand story, timing was the piece neither side could move. There is one detail in the reports I read over and over. It is the image of the Dutch team walking into the hall, looking for their opponents, and finding no one. There is a very pure kind of meaninglessness in that image. Players who had spent weeks preparing for a specific game. They had studied openings, analysed endgames, imagined hundreds of scenarios in their heads. Then they sat down, and nothing happened at all. The Viking clap rang out amid defeat, and I suddenly understood that football does not promise victory. I thought of that line while reading about Samarkand. An empty board is, in a sense, a defeat for everyone involved — including those awarded the points. Because chess, at its deepest level, is a dialogue. Without someone across from you, the person left at the board is only playing against themselves. When there is no crowd, football returns to the sound of its own breathing. When there is no opponent, chess returns to the ticking of the clock. And the chess clock is a strange creature. It does not care whether you are praying or calculating. It just runs. That is why this story cannot be told through pure emotion. In chess, time is a finite resource divided equally between two people. You cannot ask an opponent for more time without offering something in return. And if you cannot sit at the board, your time simply drains away with no one pressing the button. Based on my experience following matches and World Chess Olympiads, stories like this always have two layers. The surface layer is a story about rules, about who is right and wrong by the book. The layer underneath is a story about how an international organisation handles diversity. And the layer underneath is always harder, because it cannot be settled with a yes-or-no answer. There is one detail I consider the most important in the whole story, and it barely appeared in any headline. It is that Singapore and Colombia agreed in round five. They agreed. That means that within the same tournament, the same rulebook, the same governing body, some teams chose to accommodate and some chose not to. The choice was real. And when a choice is real, no one can invoke regulations to fully absolve themselves. But I also do not want to turn Singapore and Colombia into saints, or the Netherlands and Bulgaria into villains. That is the kind of storytelling I learned to avoid after many years in this profession. The Dutch and Bulgarian players are also competing in a tournament where every point can decide invitations, tiebreaks, even sponsorship contracts down the line. They have their reasons, and those reasons are not necessarily base. They are simply different. What is worth noting is that FIDE chose to stand outside the matter. The phrasing used in the statement — that the opponents are fully entitled to decline — is legally correct and organisationally hollow. It says: we asked, they declined, and we bear no responsibility for that. But an international federation cannot simultaneously claim to be the guardian of the sport's values and hand the protection of those values entirely over to the goodwill of its member teams. If FIDE believes that respecting religious belief is part of the spirit of sport, then FIDE must build it into the schedule, not into an appendix of special requests. If FIDE believes teams have every right to decline, then FIDE must acknowledge that its own scheduling system creates situations in which the right to decline becomes a disproportionate weapon. That is the counterintuitive angle I want to put on the table. We are arguing about the Netherlands and Bulgaria while the problem lies elsewhere: an international tournament bringing together more than a hundred nations and territories, with thousands of players from dozens of religious and cultural traditions, still runs on a calendar designed for the majority and adjusted by exception for the minority. Exception is a good solution for the unexpected. It is a poor solution for what can be predicted centuries in advance. There is one more dimension I want to raise, because it concerns how we tell this story. When a team is forfeited for religious reasons, the narrative easily slides into a story of sacrifice. People will write about players who put faith above results. People will praise them for not compromising. But I am not sure that is what is happening here. The Israeli players tried to find a solution. They submitted two requests. They did not choose to walk away. They chose to look for another time, another day, another arrangement. Their failure was not because they did not want to play. It was because the system had no open door for them to step through. That is a story about infrastructure, not about faith. The game ends, but the applause still echoes in my memory. I wrote that line years ago, after a tournament whose exact scoreline I no longer remember. I think of it now for a different reason: in Samarkand, there was no applause at all. Only the sound of chairs pulled back, clocks pressed, an arbiter's pen writing. Small sounds we usually never hear, because they are always drowned out by the sound of pieces touching the board. When no piece touches the board, those sounds become all that is left. Israel are still in the middle of the tournament. The Netherlands and Bulgaria have moved on with two free points in their pockets. The standings will keep shifting, the next rounds will keep happening, and by next week this story will likely sink beneath headlines about top-board clashes. That is how big tournaments operate: they always move forward, no matter who is left behind. But one thing will not disappear. There will come a day when some chess federation again has to choose rest days for its event. There will come a bidding committee sitting with a calendar, a list of religious holidays, and a spreadsheet. And at that moment, they will have two choices: treat diversity as a problem to be managed by exception, or treat it as a given to be integrated into the design from the start. Chess is the only sport where a player can see the entire board from the very first move. No unknowns. No surprises beyond what is already present on sixty-four squares. And yet sometimes we are the ones who cannot see what is right in front of us. Age does not extinguish love for the pitch, it only changes its colour. The same is true of chess. After twenty-one years watching this industry, I have learned that the biggest arguments are never about the moves. They are always about what lies outside the board: schedules, money, power, and silences no one wants to name. In Samarkand in 2026, that silence took the shape of an empty chair set opposite a board already opened. I think of the Dutch players sitting down and waiting. I think of the Israeli players somewhere in the city, keeping their observance whole. I think of the arbiter writing those two words and wonder whether he paused a second before putting down his pen. An empty board leaves no position behind. Nothing to analyse, nothing to argue about technically. It leaves only a gap, and that gap will sit quietly in the tournament record, waiting until someone has the courage to read it again and ask: could we have done this differently? I believe we could. Not because I romanticise human capacity, but because I have seen something similar happen the other way. Years ago, I followed a match in which a team lost, was eliminated, and still stayed in the stadium to clap in their own rhythm. No one forced them. No regulation required it. They simply chose to. Choice always exists. The question is whether we design systems wide enough to hold it. And if the answer is no, then the next board will again begin with an empty chair, in another city, in another year, with another holiday sitting on the same calendar all of us saw a long time ago. Out there in Samarkand, the games are still going. Pieces are still moving. Clocks are still ticking. And somewhere on the other side of the city, perhaps a player is sitting still, not touching a board, thinking about a day he could not compete — not because he was weaker, but because his time did not align with the world's time. That is something no standings table can measure. And perhaps it is also something we should remember longer than the result of any Olympiad.