Lies, Conspiracies, and Mating Traps
Daniel Naroditsky, Vladimir Kramnik, and an Exploration of the Dark Underbelly of Online Chess
Overview
There are at least a few views I hold that would likely inspire people to call me a conspiracy theorist. I’m pretty much inured at this point to the accusation, especially after having learned that the term itself was popularized through a CIA dispatch in a conscious attempt to quell dissent. But there was one interest of mine that I never thought would inspire people to stick me with the conspiracy theorist label: chess.
Yet that’s precisely what happened to me early last year, when I was expressing my support for the opinions of Vladimir Kramnik, the one-time chess champion of the world, and today the most controversial (that’s the polite way of putting it, but the truth is, the most hated) man in the world of chess.
For the last several years Kramnik has been campaigning more and more vocally for “fair play” in chess. At the time when when I had the chess debate that led to my being labeled a peddler of conspiracies, in early 2025, Kramnik was considered more of a nuisance than a pariah. He had begun posting videos on YouTube detailing what he believed to be widespread cheating in online chess, implicating some of the biggest names in the game. When I, by chance, met a set of fellow chess at that evening in early 2025 and began discussing Kramnik, they let it be known that his theories of widespread cheating were beyond the pale.
Today Kramnik’s opinions draw even more ire. One of the top-ranked players whom Kramnik suspected of systematic cheating in online chess was young Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky, who was found dead last week at the age of 29. This death is unmistakably terrible, and Naroditsky seems to have been widely beloved by those who knew him. No report on his death has been issued, but only a few days before his death Naroditsky conducted a livestream while appearing to be under the influence of drugs, and it is widely suspected that the cause of his death was unnatural.
Predictably, the blowback against Kramnik has been intense. On X.com, users have been quick to blame Kramnik for Naroditsky’s death, or to suggest that Kramnik himself should go die. This is par for the course; one expects stupidity, groupthink and calls to violence to predominate among the general public. But there’s a stranger trend around the hate Kramnik has received—one that I noticed the germ of when I first started becoming a chess obsessive during the pandemic. Nearly every chess celebrity who is well-known in the business has lined up to insult Kramnik or at the very least question his sanity, with a homogeneity and ubiquity reminiscent of Soviet professions of faith, or party line copypasta from the Me Too or Floyd eras. The story has even made national news, with Coleman Hughes in The Free Press posting a commemoration to Naroditsky, while stating that Kramnik’s claims were “baseless.” A coordinated campaign on both X.com and Reddit, complete with Community Notes and excessive moderation, seems determined to paint Kramnik as an irredeemable villain. The actual story is much more complicated.
A bit of history
It begins in 2020, when many fans, including myself, first began paying attention to competitive chess. Around this time, chess’s biggest stars such as Naroditsky, World #2 Hikaru Nakamura, and the sisters Andrea and Alexandra Botez began livestreaming their chess play and pulling in as many views as those streamings their exploits playing more high octane video games like Fortnite.
I first became ensorcelled by the game by watching videos from chess influencers who have now been someone overshadowed: the early streamers Grandmasters Eric Hansen and Aman Hambleton, who operate under the collective “Chessbrah,” and Ben Finegold, an obstreperous chess insult comic who also had the distinction of being one of the few players to receive that title at the comparatively old age of 40. And I first noticed something amiss when Hansen’s career took an unfortunate turn. Caught on stream drunkenly uttering obscenities toward the enormously popular streamer “xQC,” who had recently collaborated with Hansen’s rival Hikaru Nakamura, Hansen found himself shunned by the online chess community. In total unison, he was condemned by his peers, and it later came out that brass at chess.com, the company which is reported to be worth half a billion dollars, and which reaps the profits from the game’s biggest streamers, had ordered his then-girlfriend Alexandra Botez not to consort with him.
Next came the scandal which made national news. The greatest player of all time, Magnus Carlsen, refused to play the young American grandmaster Hans Niemann at an important tournament—leading to speculation that Niemann had cheated in over-the-board tournaments. (Niemann had already admitted to having cheated online as a teenager.) By and large, the chess celebrities took Carlsen’s side, and Niemann was suspended for several months from using the chess.com platform where he regularly streamed and made money. Niemann became a pariah, and the butt of many jokes, including the notion (first suggested jokingly by Eric Hansen) that his method of online cheating involved anal beads vibrating in Morse Code.
Niemann was an easy scapegoat for the chess world. Brash and arrogant, with a nearly permanent sneer painted onto his face, he looked and acted like someone born to play the villain. Then came Vladimir Kramnik, a man with a calm demeanor and almost forcefully bland appearance. Disturbed by online games he had played in which he felt his opponents had made strangely brilliant moves under impossible time controls, he began documenting his studies of suspicious behavior on his YouTube channel.
While casting suspicions on an incredible run of wins by top streamer Nakamura, Kramnik eventually zeroed in on Naroditsky, who was at the time a commentator for chess.com and a popular streamer in his own right. Kramnik’s studies can seem byzantine to the casual observer, but the conclusions of his observations are pretty straightforward. Kramnik begins by noting that Naroditsky had already admitted to cheating. In one episode of a series of videos known as a “speedrun,” in which a player starts his journey from the lowest possible rating and plays as many games as need be in order to get back to his proper rating, Naroditsky admitted that he used a chess engine—essentially a panacea that automatically turns whoever is using it into the greatest player of all time. Kramnik felt that where there was smoke there was likely fire, and analyzed a series of Naroditsky’s videos, one of which appears to show, through a reflection on glass behind him, an image of a chess board on a separate monitor, to which Naroditsky is toggling back and forth during his game. (The implication is that Naroditsky is using a chess engine to discover the best moves, although looking at any other board for any reason while playing an online game is prohibited by chess.com rules.)
As a chess fan, I was rapt when Kramnik began making these allegations. And of course I’m not the only one. Nothing captures attention like a scandal. When Kramnik first began airing his suspicions, his inquiries were met with intense curiosity, with the majority of chess streamers publicly commenting that they seriously doubted Kramnik’s claims but were interested to see more. When Kramnik finally followed up with his video that strongly suggests Naroditsky was looking at a chess board on a separate monitor during competitive games, these chess influencers simply went silent and stopped covering a story that had until then served as delicious clickbait.
Is Online Cheating Rampant?
What’s going on? In the world of chess, there is an unwritten rule that you do not publicly accuse another person of cheating—which is why Magnus Carlsen’s insinuations against Hans Niemann and Kramnik’s insinuations against Naroditsky were such big news. This unwritten rule made sense in a world of purely over-the-board chess where it is relatively difficult to cheat, and so an accusation is more likely than not to be a case of sour grapes. (It should be noted that it is difficult but not impossible, and reports have always circulated, most notably in the famous World Championship between Soviet supported Anatoly Karpov and dissident Garry Kasparov).
But in the world of online chess, it is relatively easy. If you play enough games on chess.com, you’ll eventually see your rating change at random intervals, as chess cheaters are banned and their wins against you are nullified. From the comfort of your own home, you can easily access chess engines. Software from the popular chess cites can detect whether you’ve gone so far as to create a computer program to automatically enter the best “engine moves” for you, but it can do little to prevent you from simply opening up a chess engine on a separate computer or monitor. Today, chess engines are so fast and powerful that even in short time controls, like the games Naroditsky and Nakamura play online, it is not difficult to enter your opponent’s moves on a separate screen and immediately receive information about the absolute best move to play next.
So is online cheating rampant, even among top players, even in chess.com online tournaments that dole out significant amounts of cash? Because I myself am not a competitive chess player, the unwritten rule does apply to me and I feel I can say outright: Yes, it is likely. This is the most parsimonious explanation for why the chess world went so completely silent when Kramnik uncovered new information about Naroditsky, whose fortunes were tied to those of chess.com, and also for why there seems to be such a coordinated effort to smear Kramnik among those who stand to benefit most from chess.com’s success.
A quick overview will suffice: Top Grandmaster Nihal Sarin wrote in a tweet last week, clearly referencing Kramnik and blaming him for Naroditsky’s death: “When respected figures spread unfounded accusations without accountability, real lives are destroyed.” Both Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and FIDE Master Qi Yu, two of the most popular streamers in the chess world, commented approvingly on Sarin’s statement, with Nakamura writing “Thank you for stating this so clearly.” Meanwhile, chess’s biggest streamer Levy Rozman also piled onto Kramnik, writing that while he does not condone death threats against Kramnik, “there needs to be a form of justice”—implying that some form of pain should be inflicted on Kramnik as a result of Naroditsky’s death.
There is a bitter irony here. If most players are doing at least a little bit of online cheating, it levels the playing field somewhat. Which means that, as in the steroid era of baseball, no one is really guilty when everyone is guilty. If there is indeed a large number of players who cheat online, I suspect they mostly do it to feed the insatiable algorithm (that is, to quickly churn out content like the speedrun for which Naroditsky admitted he cheated), rather than to win big tournaments during which they’re under far greater scrutiny. It may be that what put so much pressure on Naroditsky was not the accusations of small scale cheating, but the immense pressure from monied interest to deny them.
There is no question that Naroditsky’s recent death is terrible. But the reaction is one I’ve seen online many times before—the blaming of a scapegoat, in this case Kramnik, and deflection from the truth. So while the popular influencers of the chess world cry for justice, implying that Kramnik should be harmed, I salute him for his deeply unpopular commitment to uncovering the truth. His existence also serves as a useful hermeneutic for future pile-ons: No one is as hated as the person who consistently and dispassionately tries to tell the truth.