I’ll try to keep this on topic but I hate when I see the elongated hyphen when someone is writing a personal, or even professional, memo to an audience. Leave the AI out of it. Huge red flag for an imposter post. I promise this is from my human brain.
The Ultimate Checkmate
Daniel Naroditsky was a 29 year old chess grandmaster who had a streamed on Twitch and would release tutorial videos on Youtube for free. I’ve watched 100+ of his videos to help me improve my game. He’d perform these incredible moves that never once cross my brain and I had such admiration for his ability to not only make the moves, but explain the reasoning behind the moves. You can watch Hikaru and Magnus, but they don’t have the same teaching element to their style that Daniel did. That’s why he became my favorite chess streamer to watch. It appeared he had fun doing it.
This brings me to last week where he streamed this video below which would be his final one. I’ve watched the stream and it’s from a human that was not well. He was dozing off, self doubting, mumbling, and playing to a lower level than his expectation. If you watch the final 2 minutes, it’s almost like he’s crying with his send off. “Ever since the Kramnik stuff, I feel like if I start doing well, people assume the worst of intentions,” he said.
To dive deeper into this, a fellow grandmaster Russian, champion had been accusing Daniel of cheating. You can cheat by having another screen and playing the moves from a program called Stockfish. It’s always odd to me so many chess champions are mired in cheating scandals (Kramnik was involved in one OTB where he was going to the bathroom too often in 2006 that people thought he was cheating). These accusations wore heavily on Daniel who prided himself on his integrity, and based off the stream, had him taking opioids to help him sleep or with depression. The person on the video was not a sober Naroditsky. Which brings us to what happened.
The following day Daniel played in an online tournament where he won his first round then lost 0-3 to Ali Firouza. With such high expectations, the cheating scandal, and perhaps developing an opioid addiction, he overdosed, or committed suicide at 29.
The Impact
I’m 41 and have had little regard for the preciousness of life, and haven’t passed yet. It’s hard for my brain to process a 29 year old like Danya succumbing to life’s coldness. Guys like this don’t come around every day. He impacted millions of chess players and it’s important to recognize that everyone has their struggles. Some people are better at handling than others. If I wasn’t cheating, and someone thought I was, I’d consider it a compliment To a guy like Daniel, and our situations are incomparable, he couldn’t cope with accusations of him not being the straight shooter he was (or at least I’d think he was). This led to damaging mechanisms that he underestimated their power (or if he committed suicide that’s even harder for me to take) and eventually left our world. His passing gives me pause to, well, reflect on it all. When you see someone like he was in that condition during the stream, these are not indicators to take lightly. People can be in trouble and not even know it. After watching the Charlie Sheen doc on Netflix, you wonder how we keep a guy like Charlie and lose a guy like Daniel. Sadness is the main emotion I feel. This gets followed by a life is short mentality. This post is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Naroditsky whose teaching has made me blunder a few less times, hopefully not only on the board, but in life as well.
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