"FIDE Ratings — October 2026": The Folder That Held No Ratings, Only a Scotch-Defense Pitch

Hook

A folder sat in the corner of the archive — no lock, plenty of dust. The label carried two words and a date: FIDE Ratings, October 2026. I found the folder no one had opened in years, and I opened it. Inside there was no rating, no monthly list, not a single number beside a single name. Instead there was an advertisement, its headline almost soothing — "there is no need to panic." The offer was simple: if you play 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6, you need a prepared answer to 3.d4, and that answer lives in a seventy-minute course. The label says October 2026, but count the time inside and the arithmetic collapses: the text itself says Kasparov played it "twenty-five years ago." Add twenty-five to 2026 and you land on 2026. The folder is from 2026, or the writing is from 2026 — both cannot be true. Brush the dust off an archive and half the truth falls out.

Context

The Scotch is familiar ground. 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 — White opens the centre quickly, offers the exchange of pawn for knight, and the game walks off the easy path toward complication. The name comes from Scotland, from a nineteenth-century correspondence match: Edinburgh against London, club versus club, moves travelling by post. The opening is roughly two hundred years old, and its birthplace is not a tournament hall but a paper envelope. Its branches are many — Classical 4...Bc5, Mieses 4...Nf6, Schmidt, the Göring Gambit. Chess history has treated it as a respectable Open Game for a very long time.

In 2026, the World Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov put the opening back in the conversation; Kasparov won that match 12½–11½. From that match a sentence has drifted through coaching material ever since — Kasparov turned the Scotch from "harmless" into "feared." It sounds good, but it is a cultural trope, not a complete history. The piece I am writing about uses that trope as its load-bearing pillar to sell a defensive repertoire. The coach is named as Adrian Mikhalchishin, described as a "renowned and successful coach." The description is probably accurate, yet nothing inside the piece verifies it — no rating, no game reference, no engine data.

Core

This is where the real question stands. In chess we read two kinds of writing every day: ratings lists and results on one side — dry, verifiable, bound to numbers; coaching material on the other — warm, useful, arranged in the interest of a sale. Keeping them apart is easy if the label is honest. But when a headline says "FIDE Ratings — October 2026" and the body sells an opening defence, the reader is misled exactly where verification matters most.

There is nothing to fear in facing the Scotch — that is true, and it is the strongest part of this advertisement. 3.d4 is a legitimate, permanent, fully playable move. Players who answer 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 should have a prepared reply; no doubt there. But "a prepared reply is needed" and "FIDE ratings" are not the same object. The first belongs to the training market, the second to the information market. Fold them into one folder and the damage is done not to chess but to journalism.

Look at the numbers the piece avoids. How many top-level games have featured 3.d4? Not four or five — thousands. What share of games reach it today? Absent. Which variations does the seventy-minute course cover? Absent. Engine match rate? Absent. ACPL? Absent. One sentence remains — Kasparov played it in 2026, so you must learn it now. That empty space fills with imagination, and imagination is what sells.

The seventy-minute format is itself a signal. In the chess economy it marks a specific tier — short courses, quickly usable, sold cheap and in volume. That tier is legitimate, even necessary; club players have no substitute for good instructional material. The problem is not the format but the wrapping. FIDE is the name of an international body whose job is to write rules and publish ratings; endorsing courses is not its work. Put that name in a headline and an unwritten impression of approval settles on the reader — while no evidence of approval exists anywhere.

This weakness of the information market is not new. In football's transfer window rumours arrive daily, and a club-change story becomes true on social media before anyone checks it; the chess market behaves the same way. When real information is cheap, rumour travels faster; when verification costs something, advertising wins. So the only question I keep while reading this folder is: who wrote it, and what do they want? The answer is plain — someone wants to sell a course. That is not a crime. The crime is building the shop door out of FIDE's name.

I commentated Leonine Chess Club's online blitz league from Dhaka for fourteen consecutive nights, nine rounds each, peaking at six thousand viewers on a Facebook stream. There was no gallery, no weather — only a board, a clock and a voice. Those nights taught me that chess information can be verified, because every move is written down. An advertisement's label is written down nowhere. At the 2026 Olympiad in Chennai, covering Bangladesh's eleven rounds, I watched the same rating figure arranged in wildly different ways across sites. Since then I go to FIDE's list and live-rating updates for numbers, never to a headline.

There is another layer, not hidden, merely unsaid: material written around 2026 has reappeared under a 2026 label. Archival recycling is not unknown in chess — old analysis, old courses, new packaging. The irony is that chess is itself an archive-dependent sport; every game's notation is preserved, every match score preserved, the ledger nearly immutable. In the world of writing and labels there is no ledger, so anything can be written there.

Contrarian

What everyone remembers is where the error sits. We remember that Kasparov revived the Scotch. We forget that the Scotch never died. The nineteenth-century correspondence match, the Göring Gambit, twentieth-century club play, the tournaments of the seventies and eighties — the pulse never stopped. The "harmless to feared" story does more narrative work than factual work: it grants a course historical legitimacy. The 2026 match does not prove the Scotch was neglected before; it proves the opening was playable at the very top, every day — Kasparov did not choose something nobody played.

Here the India–Bangladesh border must be drawn clearly. India has more than eighty grandmasters, corporate leagues, the 2026 Chennai Olympiad; Bangladesh has five grandmasters and no new one since 2026. This is not a talent drought but a patron drought — roughly eleven lakh taka in annual federation support, a school-chess pipeline that ended in 2026, and Ziaur Rahman's death at the board in 2026. In a market where a seventy-minute defensive course sells easily, the question should be whether that club-level economy builds a durable pipeline anywhere. It does not. A course helps an individual, not an institution.

Takeaway

I closed the folder and left the question open. If you want October 2026 ratings, go to FIDE's own list or a live-rating feed, where the label and the writing agree. And if you want to stop fearing the Scotch? Open a few hundred games with 3.d4 in any good database, then decide for yourself. The archive is intact; it is only the labels that keep being rewritten.