Copyright theage
In the video, which ran for more than two hours, Naroditsky at times seemed out of sorts, disorientated and exhausted, his head sometimes falling into his hands. Some fans had expressed concern about Naroditsky’s recent behaviour and his obsession with suggestions that he cheated. On a podcast last year, he called 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, Naroditsky seemed sorry that there had ever been a dispute with Kramnik. “There’s nothing I’d rather wish for than for this to never have happened,” he said. The cheating issue Kramnik wrote in his statement that he had received death threats and 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, Kramnik added that he felt he was being targeted by a PR campaign that was “working well this time”. Kramnik, who retired 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 Kramnik and Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria was stopped when Topalov’s manager accused Kramnik of cheating by using a computer during bathroom breaks. Organisers locked the bathroom. Kramnik refused to continue until it was reopened. They did, and Kramnik won the match. Many chess players initially backed 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,” 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, Carlsen accused Hans Niemann, a young American, of cheating after losing to Niemann, a lesser ranked player, in a tournament in St Louis. 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, Carlsen said he had initially thought Kramnik had been “fighting a good fight” in trying to root out cheating. But, Carlsen said 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 Naroditsky. “I don’t think anybody thought that Naroditsky was cheating,” Carlsen said. ‘Danya truly was adored’ Kenneth Regan, a computer science professor at the University at Buffalo in New York who has studied cheating in chess, said he estimated 1 to 2 per cent of participants cheat in general online chess. Naroditsky was one of several dozen prominent players 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 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 Kramnik about Naroditsky. 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 such as 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 Centre, where 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, 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. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
