Chess thread

I know we have some serious players here, and this looks like a story that’s as disturbing as it is fascinating. My pre-teen son has really gotten into the game in the last few months– I can no longer beat him if he’s actually trying, and last week he won his division of the only tournament he’s ever entered — so I’m following this story with more than random interest.

. . . Commenter Robth:

It’s hard to even say to what extent it’s a chess story rather than a social media story or a story about human cruelty.

(Summary for those not in the chess world; the former world champion Vladimir Kramnik started first asserting that there was much more cheating than generally acknowledged in the world of high level online chess, and then accusing specific people. His evidence was never strong in any of these cases, and generally involved a ton of misunderstood statistics; by the time he moved on to accusing random people he might as well have been pulling names out of a hat. His motivations are hard to discern but seem to mostly have been that he didn’t like that he wasn’t great at online speed chess (which has its own skills above and beyond just general chess ability), that he was struggling to come to grasp with the fact that he’d aged out of the world elite, and that he generally resented not being held in quite as high esteem as he felt he deserved (and this is not to say that he wasn’t esteemed – his reputation before all this was massive, even if he wasn’t seen as being in the GOAT conversation in the way that Carlsen and Kasparov are).

No serious objective evaluator ever thought Naroditsky was cheating; the “evidence” Kramnik threw up against him was laughably weak. Kramnik did, however, pick up a certain number of hangers-on, particularly in the Russian-speaking chess world. He was also given a fair amount of credibility early on when he was talking more about cheating in general and less about specific players, since some top GMs feel that it’s a huge problem for competitive online chess. Mostly, though, I think his following was people who liked having an excuse to go on a crusade (or just to bully) and Russians who felt that Russia was being picked on unfairly and saw a chance to hit back. (This seems to have included Nepomniatchi and some other top Russians, from what in-the-know players are saying about what’s going on behind the scenes.)

Kramnik followed a pretty basic bully pattern – he poked at a bunch of targets, and focused most on those he could get a rise out of. Naroditsky, who was a sensitive guy, possibly somewhat neurodivergent, and as a bilingual Russian-English speaker was more in the mix of what Russian players were saying, was the target he got one of the biggest rises out of, so he kept after him. Naroditsky’s best move was probably just to ignore this all, but I think he found that too hard and really wanted to prove his innocence in a way everyone would accept, and the stress seems to have taken a big toll on him.

Daniel was an amazing chess teacher – I’ve picked up a ton from his videos, and there was a really clear creative joy in the stuff he taught. It sucks that someone took a game that he loved and shared with others and made it a source of pain for him, and it’s miserable that it ended this way. I don’t know what we can do to prevent this – far more people loved Naroditsky than were after him, but it’s very hard for a human being to ignore persistent voices screaming insulta at us. I don’t know what we can do now but remember to be kind to each other and do whatever you can to stand up against the kind of person who takes joy in inflicting suffering.

(Context: I’m an active chess player/fan – 2000 http://chess.com rapid for those who know what that means – and have been aware of this story since Kramnik first started making noise)