Revealed: The final hours of chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky

The grandmaster’s final moves are preserved in heartbreaking footage. It is distressing, raw and long, running to precisely two and a half hours and depicting the penultimate morning of Daniel Naroditsky’s life.

The view will be familiar to the 800,000 who followed him on social media – Naroditsky is at a desk in his home office in Charlotte, North Carolina and talking his way through the matches he is playing on the screen in front of him.

But this was different, because it was the early hours of Saturday and one of the most influential and loved figures in chess appears to be in a deep crisis in the middle of a live broadcast.

It isn’t the cascading string of defeats that draws attention, even though it is unusual – in the fast-twitch world of three-minute blitz games, he was among the very best.

The sharper concern is his behaviour.

When I first started watching Naroditsky’s streams years ago, it was because of his gift for taking the average club player on a ride through a realm beyond our comprehension. He was capable of beating the elite in the most frenzied form of the game while providing relatable, breathless analysis on what was happening and why. 

Like the finest of them, he could see into the future. But this wasn’t that. Not on Saturday morning.

It was erratic, agitated. He had been on air a matter of minutes when he initially alluded to the man he was convinced was trying to ruin his life, but he was winning on the board, so the more troubling signs were slower to arrive.

Then, gradually, it got darker. There was a monologue 43 minutes in, again about the man, or rather the consequence of what he had been spreading: ‘I could not live if I knew that some carry the notion that I am morally bankrupt.’

By then, he had played five and had won three, but soon the losses came. Ten in a row. With them, the mood worsens.

At one juncture, the 29-year-old, a graduate of Stanford who been a world champion at 12 and a published author by 14, follows a defeat by grabbing the curls of his hair and yanking hard, before thumping his left fist against the table. By turns, he would switch from English to Russian, the tongue of his parents, and then back again via impersonations of accents from the Deep South.

Subscribers to his Twitch feed, confused as they watch it play out, start to ask Naroditsky in the comments section if he is OK, all of which came before the doorbell rang, two-and-a-quarter hours into a video that can still be viewed on YouTube. A welfare check was being performed in real time.

It was unclear how Oleksandr Bortnyk and Peter Giannatos, two of Naroditsky’s closest friends, then got into the house. But when they reach his office, at some point between 1am and 2am, Naroditsky slips into a more animated state.

‘You’ve gotta go to sleep, man,’ was Giannatos’s first intervention to the guy they always referred to as Danya.

‘I know, just give me a few more games and I’ll go to sleep. I set a 2am curfew, what’s the matter?’ Naroditsky replies, and he seems upset by the inference.

‘What’s the plan?’ asks Giannatos, calmly.

But his friend cuts him off, a little angrier: ‘Please. I don’t understand what the issue is. Please let me play a few more in peace and I’m off to bed.’

He briefly has his way and carries on. While those final two games are in progress, Bortnyk, a Ukrainian grandmaster, and Giannatos, the head of their chess club, can do nothing but watch.

We never see them in the footage. But we know they are there, an invisible and tangible reminder of what was unfolding in the last video Naroditsky ever made.

They had been alongside Naroditsky for years, especially through the traumas of 2024 when Vladimir Kramnik, one of the greatest players in history, first started out on his sustained campaign of unsubstantiated allegations that suggested Naroditsky was a cheat.

No one in chess seemed to take Kramnik’s claims seriously, because the evidence appeared so thin and, frankly, Kramnik had developed a reputation as a conspiracy theorist, protesting against the ‘chess mafia’.

He has accused many players of cheating. But the slurs became a toxin in the brilliant mind of Naroditsky, whose livelihood depended on his credibility as an honest broker. Lately, he had stepped back from doing what he did best. But his hope, and his friends’ hope, was that with a bit of help he could just push through it.

When Naroditsky’s last two games were done, both won, Giannatos had another go at stopping him. His urgency had increased, and maybe he was aware by then that a number of opponents had earlier aborted matches on this night because they apparently wanted no part in the spiral. ‘Danya, finish the stream,’ says Giannatos firmly.

‘Can I end on the next loss?’ is the response.

‘No. I’ll unplug it if you don’t end it.’

What Naroditsky says to him next is devastating. ‘The problem is, since the Kramnik stuff, I feel like if I start doing well, people assume the worst of intentions.’

Giannatos: ‘You don’t have to prove anything to those people.’

Naroditsky started one more game as 2am approached on Saturday before ending his broadcast as the opening made way for the middlegame. He was found dead on his couch at home by Bortnyk on the Sunday.

Accusations of cheating are common in chess, especially in the years following its Covid boom, which ignited its vast popularity online.

The website chess.com alone has 200 million users and it will forever be difficult to know if an opponent is stealing an edge with software engines capable of processing optimal moves in split-seconds.

In 2024, Kramnik, now 50, indirectly accused Naroditsky of doing just that. There were allusions to him looking sideways during matches at another screen, of disingenuously inflating his rating by picking on easier sparring partners, and lengthy videos were posted online to explain his theories.

It went on until Naroditsky’s death. ‘Evil and unhinged,’ was Naroditsky’s take at this time last year. In the space between Saturday and the announcement of his passing on Monday, Kramnik was still having his say.

On his X account on October 19, prior to the tragic news, he cited the ‘strange recent stream of Naroditsky’, and by then he had also posted a picture with a caption: ‘The drugs don’t work.’

To those outside chess, unfamiliar with its wildly competitive ecosystem at the elite end, some of this awful episode might jar against impressions of a sedate game. Inside, the truth is very different. Aside from regular slanging matches between protagonists, cheating is a familiar topic.

On one end of the scale, there was the saga of the Ukrainian Kirill Schevchenko, who had his grandmaster title revoked this year when he was found to have stashed a phone in a toilet at a tournament.

More famously, the world’s best player, Magnus Carlsen, made tacit accusations against the American Hans Niemann after losing to him in 2022. A baseless social media post from a follower of that row suggested Niemann’s method was to receive electronic signals on strategy via vibrating anal beads – remarkably, some accepted that as fact. Carlsen was forced to settle a $100million defamation case brought by Niemann.

The scale of the wider issue is still a matter of conjecture. ‘The rate of cheating online is 100 to 200 times higher than over the board,’ said the international master Kenneth Regan, who by trade is a computer scientist and is responsible for detecting cheats for chess’s governing body, FIDE. ‘From my point of view, there are five to 10 cases per year over the board.’

Few appear to have given much credence to Kramnik’s claims against Naroditsky. The assessment of world No 2 Hikaru Nakamura, who himself is among those accused of cheating by the Russian, offered his view in the wake of the tragedy: ‘Kramnik can go f*** himself and rot in hell.’

In the days since Naroditsky’s death was announced on Monday, Kramnik, who dethroned Garry Kasparov in London in 2000 and reigned as world champion for seven years, has faced a vicious backlash. Nakamura was merely the most graphic.

Carlsen has also cited Kramnik’s ‘horrible’ crusade, saying this week: ‘With the whole Kramnik situation… Obviously I have had problems with him in the past, not like big problems but generally.

‘I thought at the end of the day he is kind of fighting the good fight. But it turned on its head. First of all, he started to go after Hikaru which seemed crazy. He started going after Naroditsky so hard – first of all, I don’t think anybody thought Naroditsky was cheating. I thought the way he was going after Naroditsky was horrible.’

Many of the rank and file have echoed the sentiment. The Indian grandmaster Nihal Sarin went further than most in telling the Indian Express: ‘He (Kramnik) has kind of literally taken a life.

‘Cheating in chess is a huge problem. But what Kramnik does is completely unacceptable. He just blurts out accusations every day… He was a world champion, a very influential figure after all. And I don’t know if he realises the impact it can have on innocent people.

‘Kramnik’s methods, it seems like you burn down a city to catch some cheaters, basically. You kill some thousand other completely innocent guys to get one or two guys.’

Police in Charlotte have confirmed to Daily Mail Sport that an investigation is active, albeit the parameters are unknown.

As for Kramnik, his conduct in the affair is now being scrutinised by FIDE, whose CEO Emil Sutovsky has criticised the vigilante move to name and shame. ‘The way he approaches it simply can’t be accepted,’ he said.

For his part, Kramnik posted cryptically on social media: ‘I have contacted the Charlotte Police Department and asked them to investigate the death of Daniel, providing them some additional info. Hope will be done, and real truth about the circumstances and cause of this tragedy will be revealed, despite all attempts to hide it.’

In retweeting a post to him on X, which read ‘You should die mother******’, Kramnik also wrote on Wednesday: ‘Already hundred such criminal acts, received, legal team informing the police, letter to the Criminal Court getting ready in few hours. Whatever happens next, all those falsely blaming me will be legally responsible.’ Daily Mail Sport has attempted to make contact with Kramnik through a GoFundMe page he created in March to tackle cheating in chess.

For Naroditsky’s relatives, friends and admirers, that is a cause which has been pursued at devastating cost.

‘There was nothing more important to Daniel than his dignity and his name as a chess player,’ Naroditsky’s mother told Daily Mail Sport. ‘And the ex-world champion was trying to say he’s a cheater.

‘Daniel tried to defend himself so much. The whole world was on Daniel’s side. He played more and did more and more because he was trying to prove that he’s not what he was accused of.’

It remains to be seen how chess will pick up the pieces from such a tragic loss.