Daniel Naroditsky, a chess grandmaster, the highest title given to competitors by the International Chess Federation, and a popular chess commentator and livestreamer, has died. He was 29.
The Charlotte Chess Center, a chess academy in Charlotte, N.C., where Mr. Naroditsky was a head coach, announced his death on Monday in a statement on social media. It did not cite a cause or say where he died.
In his short career, Mr. Naroditsky, who was known as Danya, became one of the game’s most accomplished players and a highly respected teacher and insightful commentator, praised for his knowledge of the game, his wit and his ability to easily explain difficult concepts.
Daniel Naroditsky was born on Nov. 9, 1995, in San Mateo, Calif., to Lena Schuman and Vladimir Naroditsky. Daniel Naroditsky recalled in a 2022 interview with The New York Times that he was 6 years old when his older brother, Alan, introduced him to chess at a birthday party.
Alan, who was familiar with the game but still a beginner, taught Daniel to play and beat him regularly for the first six months or so. Daniel got better at it, but there was no immediate realization that he had found his calling, he said.
“I think a lot of people want to imagine that it was love at first sight, and that my brother couldn’t pull me away from the chessboard,” Mr. Naroditsky told The Times. “It was more of a gradual process, where chess slowly entered the battery of stuff we did to pass the time. A lot of my best memories are just doing stuff with my brother.”
Mr. Naroditsky was ranked No. 1 for his age group in the United States for several years, according to the United States Chess Federation. As a fifth grader, he became the youngest person ever to win the Northern California K-12 Championship, according to Chess.com. In November 2007, he was named the under-12 World Youth Chess Champion.
He was awarded the title of international master in 2011 and earned his grandmaster title in 2013 at a tournament in Villa de Benasque, Spain. He was 17 and had yet to finish high school.
Mr. Naroditsky graduated from Stanford University in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in history. Though his parents wanted him to pursue a corporate career, he dedicated his life to chess, moving to Charlotte to be a resident grandmaster and head coach at the Charlotte Chess Center.
He was also a world-class player of a form of bullet chess in which each player must make all of their moves in a minute or less. At his death, he was ranked No. 22 in the world in bullet chess, according to Chess.com, for which he became a popular chess commentator during high-level tournaments.
“He was highly sought after because he was witty, and he was fast in terms of his assessments” said Dylan Loeb McClain, a former chess columnist for The Times.
Levy Rozman, who runs the YouTube channel Gotham Chess, said that Mr. Naroditsky could challenge the world’s top players, including Magnus Carlsen, and still had the ability to “explain the game to an ant.”
“He was this really bright individual who was at the perfect crossroads of being able to play the game at a brilliant level and explain it at a brilliant level,” Mr. Rozman said.
Mr. Naroditsky’s online personality helped elevate his profile while making chess more accessible. He used his Twitch and YouTube channels, each of which have more than 300,000 followers, to livestream games and guide viewers through notable plays.
“Hop into my stream for great chess, good tunes, and an amazing community!!” Mr. Naroditsky wrote in the About Me section of his Twitch profile.
His father died in 2019. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.
When he was 14, Mr. Naroditsky combined two of his passions — writing and chess — to publish a book on the game called “Mastering Positional Chess.” For several months in 2022, he was a chess columnist for The Times, where he contributed an interactive puzzle called “Chess Replay,” based on historic chess matches.
In the 2022 interview with The Times, Mr. Naroditsky described chess as a game that never stops teaching.
“Even at my level,” he said, “I can still discover beautiful things about the game every single time I train, teach, play or am a commentator at a tournament.”
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