Daniel Naroditsky, chess grandmaster, the highest title granted to competitors by the International Chess Federation, and popular chess commentator and live broadcaster, has died. He was 29 years old.
The Charlotte Chess Center, a chess academy in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Mr. Naroditsky was head coach, announced his death Monday in a statement posted on social media. It did not cite a cause or indicate where he died.
During his short career, Mr. Naroditsky, known as Danya, became one of the game’s most accomplished players, as well as a highly respected teacher and insightful commentator, praised for his knowledge of the game, his wit and his ability to explain difficult concepts with ease.
Daniel Naroditsky was born on November 9, 1995, in San Mateo, California, 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 knew the game but was still a beginner, taught Daniel how to play and beat him consistently for about six months. Daniel improved, but he didn’t immediately realize 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 keep me away from the board,” Mr. Naroditsky told the Times. “It was more of a gradual process, where failures slowly entered into the mix of things we did to pass the time. A lot of my best memories are just from doing stuff with my brother.”
He was ranked #1 in the United States when he was only 9 years old. As a fifth grader, he became the youngest person to win the Northern California K-12 championship, according to Chess.com. In November 2007, he was named world youth chess champion under the age of 12.
He received the title of International Master in 2011 and won his Grandmaster title in 2013 at a tournament in Villa de Benasque, Spain. He was 17 years old and had not yet finished high school.
Mr. Naroditsky graduated from Stanford University in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in history. Although his parents wanted him to pursue a corporate career, he dedicated his life to chess and moved to Charlotte to become resident grandmaster and head coach at the Charlotte Chess Center.
He was also a world-class player at ball chess, one of the fastest forms of chess, in which each player has a minute or less to make a move. At his death, he was ranked No. 22 in the world in ball chess, according to Chess.com, for which he became a popular chess commentator at high-level tournaments.
“He was highly sought after because he was witty and quick with assessments,” said Dylan Loeb McClain, a former chess columnist for The Times.
Levy Rozman, who runs the Gotham Chess YouTube channel, said Mr. Naroditsky could challenge the world’s best players, including Magnus Carlsen, and still had the ability “to explain the game to an ant.”
“He was a truly brilliant individual who was at the perfect crossroads to be able to play the game at a brilliant level and explain the game at a brilliant level,” Mr. Rozman said.
Mr. Naroditsky’s online persona has helped raise his profile while making chess more accessible. He used his Twitch and YouTube channels, which each have over 300,000 subscribers, to live stream games and guide viewers through notable games.
“Join my stream for good chess, great music 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.
At the age of 14, Mr. Naroditsky combined two of his passions – writing and chess – to publish a book about the game called “Mastering Positional Chess.” For several months in 2022, he was a chess columnist for The Times, where he wrote an interactive puzzle called “Chess Replay,” based on historical chess matches.
In the 2022 Times interview, Mr. Naroditsky described chess as a game that never stops teaching.
“Even at my level,” he said, “I can still discover great things about the game every time I train, teach, play or commentate at a tournament.”
