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Did Cheating Accusations Have Anything to Do With Death of a Chess Grandmaster?
| UN peacekeeper | 10/25/25 |
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Date: October 25th, 2025 7:59 PM Author: UN peacekeeper Daniel Naroditsky, a top American player, was found dead in Charlotte, N.C., after talking about being accused of cheating by a former world champion. Chess has long produced prodigies with complicated personalities, prone to quirks, fierce rivalries and sometimes tortured relationships with the game itself. Daniel Naroditsky, a chess grandmaster, was at once a successor to that lineage and a merry subverter of it.
A grade-school wizard who topped American rankings for his age at 9 years old, Mr. Naroditsky built a fervent online fan base with a sense of humor and humility about a pastime that has humbled even experts who study its seemingly endless permutations.
“More so than in any other game,” Mr. Naroditsky told The New York Times in 2022, “you’re going to suck for a while.”
On Monday, the news of the death of Mr. Naroditsky, 29, stunned the same chess world that he had devoted himself to, leading to an outpouring of grief and bitter accusations that another elite player, Vladimir Kramnik, a Russian grandmaster and former world champion, had bullied him. How Mr. Naroditsky died is unknown: He was found unresponsive at his home in Charlotte, N.C., on Sunday night, and the cause of death is being looked into as suicide, an overdose or natural causes, according to the police.
As the investigation continues, several chess players have suggested that Mr. Kramnik bore responsibility for repeatedly insinuating, in a series of videos, comments and posts, that Mr. Naroditsky, known as Danya, had been cheating online.
“He has literally taken a life,” Nihal Sarin, an Indian grandmaster, wrote in an essay in The Indian Express.
Levy Rozman, a Brooklyn-based international master who posts on YouTube as GothamChess, echoed that outrage, saying, “It’s very difficult to separate the horrible news of Danya’s passing with the treatment he received from the former world champion, an idol of his.”
In a statement on Saturday on X, Mr. Kramnik wrote that he had “never made any personal attack or insult toward” Mr. Naroditsky, adding that efforts to link him to the death “cross all boundaries of basic human morality.” The controversy comes as chess has surged in popularity — owing in part to the pandemic, the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” and access to online play. Chess.com, a major force in the industry, has more than 225 million users, with 20 million games played daily, according to the company.
Chess, once the domain of suited men in stuffy clubs, is now enlivened by worldwide, 24/7 competition, popular social media personalities and games sometimes accelerated to the point of adrenaline overload.
But as the game’s popularity has exploded, cheating has become an increasingly common occurrence in online chess. Computers have long proved their dominance over humans in the game, and players can run nearly instantaneous simulations of complex positions.
Mr. Naroditsky’s specialty was a form of chess known as “bullet,” during which both players have only a minute to complete all their moves, or forfeit, with attacking and traps often taking the place of the game’s traditional deep thinking. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people tune in to watch these virtuoso displays of lightning chess.
Prize money for online tournaments has also grown, with the top tournaments offering hundreds of thousands of dollars, even as chess influencers claim healthy salaries sometimes without ever winning major titles.
Trash talk is also common, with anonymous social media accounts carrying out personal attacks. In many ways, Mr. Kramnik’s suggestions of cheating further delivered chess into the modern moment, with all its tech-native conspiracy theories and mutual suspicion.
Mr. Naroditsky, a prodigy whose parents immigrated from Eastern Europe, grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from Stanford University. He became a grandmaster — chess’s highest ranking-category — at 18. He attracted about 800,000 followers across YouTube, where he had posted over 600 videos on his channel, and Twitch, and had a glowing reputation as a commentator, teacher and promoter of the game.
“He showed that you could be a genius,” said Daniel Rensch, a founder of Chess.com, where Mr. Naroditsky was a contributor. “But you also didn’t have to be arrogant.”
From Idol to Rival Mr. Kramnik, 50, was world champion from 2000 to 2007, and is widely considered one of the greatest players in the game’s history. Mr. Naroditsky grew up idolizing the champion; there is a photo of him as a 12-year-old with Mr. Kramnik, both smiling.
In his statement, Mr. Kramnik expressed his “deepest condolences to all of Mr. Naroditsky’s loved ones in connection with the tragic and untimely passing,” calling him a “remarkable chess player and person.”
At the same time, Mr. Kramnik wrote that he also stood ready to supply “evidence” questioning whether Mr. Naroditsky abided by rules of “fair play” online.
Mr. Kramnik’s insinuations about Mr. Naroditsky’s chess play date to at least last October, when Mr. Kramnik posted comments about the prodigy’s unusual accuracy and high ranking in high-speed chess.
Mr. Kramnik also posted videos, including one called “Exposing Private Danya.” In it, the Russian grandmaster comments on recorded remarks by Mr. Naroditsky, accusing the young American of lying and being evasive. He also said Mr. Naroditsky had been elusive about his eye movements during streamed games — suggesting he was looking at other screens while playing.
But he treaded delicately, never accusing Mr. Naroditsky directly of cheating in competitions.
“I’m not accusing,” Mr. Kramnik said. “I’m just asking questions.”
Last October, Mr. Kramnik also challenged Mr. Naroditsky to a match with each player putting up $50,000; Mr. Naroditsky turned it down, but did debate him on a Russian chess program — in Russian — defending himself.
But Mr. Naroditsky’s friends and followers noticed that the accusations seemed to weigh on him and threatened his standing in the community. His pace of posting videos had slowed in recent months, as he stepped back from chess commentating.
“It had clearly taken him to a point where he was not in a great space,” Magnus Carlsen, the world’s top-ranked player and a five-time world champion, said in a YouTube video on Tuesday.
Last Friday, two days before his death, Mr. Naroditsky livestreamed from North Carolina, playing dozens of games, one after another, while speaking about the cheating accusations that Mr. Kramnik had made. In the video, which ran more than two hours, Mr. Naroditsky at times seemed out of sorts, disorientated and exhausted, his head sometimes falling into his hands.
Some fans had expressed concern about Mr. Naroditsky’s recent behavior and his obsession with suggestions that he cheated. On a podcast last year, he called Mr. Kramnik “one of the most wicked, wicked people that I’ve ever dealt with,” and accused him of “trying to ruin my life.”
But in the final video, Mr. Naroditsky seemed sorry that there had ever been a dispute with Mr. Kramnik.
“There’s nothing I’d rather wish for than for this to never have happened,” he said. The Cheating Issue Mr. Kramnik wrote in his statement on Saturday that he had received death threats, and that he intended to pursue criminal and civil cases against people who have made “blatantly false and criminal statements against me regarding Daniel’s death.”
In recent texts sent to The New York Times, Mr. Kramnik added that he felt he was being targeted by a P.R. campaign that was “working well this time.”
Mr. Kramnik, who retired from in 2019, began a campaign to expose online cheating about two years ago, and had also once been accused of cheating.
In 2006, a world championship match between Mr. Kramnik and Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria was stopped when Mr. Topalov’s manager accused Mr. Kramnik of cheating by using a computer during bathroom breaks. Organizers locked the bathroom. Mr. Kramnik refused to continue until it was reopened. They did, and Mr. Kramnik won the match.
Many chess players initially backed Mr. Kramnik’s efforts to combat cheating, said Kostya Kavutskiy, an international master, streamer and commentator.
“He’s definitely not the only top player who thinks it’s a huge issue,” Mr. Kavutskiy said. “I think virtually all of them do. But he was very public about it and started to really, really try to go after players in a public way.”
There have been several cheating accusations in the chess world. In 2022, Mr. Carlsen accused Hans Niemann, a young American, of cheating after losing to Mr. Niemann, a lesser ranked player, in a tournament in St. Louis.
Mr. Niemann later confessed to cheating in online chess as a young player, but insisted he never cheated during in-person games.
In his video on Wednesday, Mr. Carlsen said he had initially thought Mr. Kramnik had been “fighting a good fight” in trying to root out cheating. But, Mr. Carlsen said that Mr. Kramnik had gone too far with attacks on players like Hikaru Nakamura — the world’s top streamer, who is also ranked No. 2 in the world — and for going “so hard” after Mr. Naroditsky.
“I don’t think anybody thought that Naroditsky was cheating,” Mr. Carlsen said.
“Danya truly was adored” Kenneth W. Regan, a computer science professor at the University at Buffalo who has studied cheating in chess, said he estimates that 1 to 2 percent of participants cheat in general online chess. Mr. Naroditsky was one of several dozen prominent players Mr. Regan said he had recently examined to see whether they had significant anomalies between their performances in slow chess and blitz chess, tracking his results across several months. His results found no indication that Mr. Naroditsky was cheating.
On Thursday, players from around the world attended a memorial service in San Francisco. FIDE, the international governing board of chess, has announced that it will investigate “all relevant public statements” made by Mr. Kramnik about Mr. Naroditsky.
Mr. Rensch, from Chess.com, described the mood of attendees at the San Francisco event as “devastated.”
“It’s been both shock, in terms of how this happened, and, of course, just no one really knowing fully why yet,” he said, adding, “Danya truly was adored by the chess community.”
Other players said they understood how criticism and accusations from a champion like Mr. Kramnik could be painful, especially when repeated by others.
“If somebody like him accused you, no matter what, there are people who would follow his opinion and would also keep saying the same things,” said Anastasiya Karlovich, a Ukrainian women’s grandmaster and journalist.
In a statement posted by the Charlotte Chess Center, where Mr. Naroditsky was a head coach, his family asked for privacy while praising him. “Let us remember Daniel for his passion and love for the game of chess,” it read.
In his final video, Mr. Naroditsky said that “since the Kramnik stuff, I feel like if I start doing well, people assume the worst of intentions.”
Moments later, he mentioned “the lingering effect of it” and became slightly choked up.
“One final game,” he said, his voice breaking, before signing off moments later. |