Chess world mourns 29-year-old streaming pioneer
Kramnik criticized for reckless cheating accusations
Fide CEO’s statement prompts calls for resignation
The International Chess Federation (Fide) said on Wednesday it is examining former world champion Vladimir Kramnik’s public attacks on Daniel Naroditsky, the American grandmaster whose sudden death at 29 has stunned the chess world and laid bare fissures in the sport’s digital age.
Naroditsky, among the most visible faces of chess’s pandemic-era renaissance, was one of the most popular players and teachers of his generation, a Stanford-educated prodigy who won the Under-12 world championship, became a grandmaster at 18 and went on to amass more than 800,000 followers across Twitch and YouTube. Known by his nickname Danya, the California-born Naroditsky’s mix of patience, humor, generosity and gift for communication made him a standard-bearer of chess’s online boom, helping to bring vast new audiences to a centuries-old pastime.