Grief has enveloped the chess world over the past 10 days since the passing of Daniel Naroditsky — Danya, as he was fondly called – at the age of 29. While he was one of the foremost blitz and bullet players in the world after being a child prodigy, Naroditsky’s appeal in the sport went much beyond that. He has been remembered as a commentator, a chess educator, and an influencer with a massive following. At the time of his death, he had a rating of 2619, and was the world no.151.
Those who follow the sport speak of Naroditsky’s wicked sense of humour: he famously played seven fast-and-furious blitz games against Magnus Carlsen in January last year on the day the world no.1 got married. Even though he could not beat the Norwegian in a single game, Naroditsky later joked that he had managed to steal Carlsen away from his wife for 30 minutes.
While he created plenty of educational chess content, many of his 3,40,000 followers on Twitch and 4,82,000 followers on YouTube were drawn by his ability to make chess fun and imitate some of the most famous men in the sport like Garry Kasparov, Viswanathan Anand and Hikaru Nakamura. His Kasparov impression, for one, was on-point and pitch perfect.
After Naroditsky’s demise, clips of his imitations have spawned countless videos on YouTube, with the comments sections now acting as platforms for his fans to post condolence messages.
A child prodigy and a history major from Stanford University, Naroditsky wrote a book on chess strategy called Mastering Positional Chess when he was only 14 years old.
Over the past week, everyone in the sport seems to have rummaged through the attic of their minds to dig out a favourite Danya memory.
This undated photo released by Charlotte Chess Center shows Daniel Naroditsky playing chess on the board. (Kelly Centrelli/Charlotte Chess Center via AP
British Grandmaster David Howell spoke of how after a particularly rankling defeat in the British Chess Championships last year to Shreyas Royal, when he was unable to sleep, Narodistky had kept him company for eight hours while they played chess online.
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“That night, I couldn’t sleep. I tried but couldn’t get my head off the chess, so I ended up going on chess.com and played a few games. And yeah, after a while, I got a challenge from Daniel, and we ended up playing for like eight hours,” Howell recalls on the Take Take Take app. “But during the games, he messaged me: ‘Hey man, I saw you lost today, but keep your head up. You’re such a good player. You’re a legend. You can still do this.’ Then he even called me at 3.00 am British time. We were talking on the phone while playing this blitz match against each other. He was destroying me but he was cracking jokes to cheer me up, and I bounced back with a win the next day, even though I had barely slept. He didn’t have to (cheer me up). He was just a nice guy.”
Good sport
Chess influencer Andrea Botez, in a long post on X, mentioned how she and her sister Alexandra would play matches against Naroditsky, where he started with 45 seconds on his clock against the two of them with three minutes.
“We’d add embarrassing punishments, but he never complained. He’d just laugh it off and say, ‘Please, Alexandra, just don’t make me dance again.’”
She then pointed out the pains that Naroditsky had gone through to prove his innocence in the face of cheating accusations levelled at him by former world champion Vladimir Kramnik.
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“He played with five cameras, went live on Russian TV, and accepted unfair conditions just to prove his honesty. Despite it all, he delivered some of the strongest performances of his career,” wrote Andrea.
Every tribute to Naroditsky — a man who spent much of his last year fighting unsubstantiated allegations of cheating —has a mention of his unbelievable chess skills.
Carlsen, who does not take too kindly to losing, spoke of how Naroditsky could drum up attacks out of nothing and would quite often actually checkmate him. Fabiano Caruana dedicated a whole episode on the C Squared podcast to discussing the brilliance of Naroditsky’s chess, while focusing on two specific games.
Peter Gianntos, the founder and CEO of the Charlotte Chess Centre, where Naroditsky trained and taught, gave a moving speech at the funeral, where he mentioned how his jaw had dropped when he saw Danya play bullet chess on a laptop using a trackpad rather than a mouse.
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Hikaru Nakamura went as far as to compare Naroditsky’s style to that of the legendary Mikhail Tal, who liked to sacrifice pieces before winning games.
“I think that other than three players — Magnus, Alireza Firouzja and myself — Danya was probably the favourite against anybody in a straight-up blitz match with three minutes and no increment. His style was just very unique, and it was very good in these faster formats. But as we saw even in classical chess, he did beat Caruana in the US Championship once,” Nakamura told ChessBase India. “I’m going to miss those games against him because the attacking style he had, he would go for piece sacrifices. It was kind of similar to the style of someone like Mikhail Tal. And it was very effective.”
Such was his impact that a chess club in Gurugram called Espresso Defense Chess Club recently held a rapid and blitz event as a tribute to Naroditsky.
GM Oleksandr Bortnyk, one of Naroditsky’s closest friends, spoke about Danya in a Twitch stream on Monday. “He was a very talented chess player… But more importantly, he was a very good guy. A very kind guy.”
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And that’s exactly how the world of chess will remember Danya.
