Critic of chess grandmaster found dead was caught up in a cheating scandal of his own

The Russian chess master accused by his peers of bullying Daniel Naroditsky, the U.S. grandmaster who was found dead last week, has himself been hit with unfounded cheating allegations in the past — a 2006 chess scandal that came to be known as “Toiletgate.”

The manager of Vladimir Kramnik’s opponent in that title match, Veselin Topalov, claimed the Russian was using the bathroom up to 50 times per match to surreptitiously look up chess moves on a computer — a charge that Kramnik’s manager hotly denied.

“It should also be mentioned that Mr. Kramnik has to drink a lot of water during the games” and likes to pace in the bathroom, Carsten Hansel added, according to news reports.

Chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky dies at 29

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Kramnik eventually won the match and became the undisputed world champion of chess, but only after agreeing to World Chess Federation (FIDE) demands that he use the same bathroom as his opponent. It was a concession Kramnik initially protested with a sit-in near the bathroom, causing him to forfeit one of the games in the match.

Later, Topalov and his manager were sanctioned by the FIDE Ethics Commission for “making unsubstantiated accusations of cheating.”

Kramnik, responding to an NBC News request for comment on the renewed interest in “Toiletgate,” said in an email on Friday, “Since I always played fair throughout my career, this insinuation didn’t bother me much, I took it quite lightly.”

Since Kramnik had repeatedly suggested Naroditsky had cheated, his own brush with what turned out to be apparently baseless allegations resurfaced this week in the wake of Naroditsky’s death. A cause of death for Naroditsky has not been announced.

“It is a bit ironic for someone like Kramnik, who had been accused of cheating, to then turn around and accuse somebody else of cheating,” Erik Allebest, CEO of Chess.com, which is the largest chess platform in the world, said Friday.

Young chess champ found dead

Naroditsky, 29, was found dead Sunday at his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. Police on Thursday said they were investigating his death as a possible suicide or drug overdose.

FIDE said it would investigate whether Kramnik should be disciplined for the disparaging public statements he made “before and after the tragic death” of Naroditsky.

During his last livestream on Saturday, Naroditsky told his audience that the cheating claims by Kramnik, whom he once idolized, had taken a toll on him.

“Ever since the Kramnik stuff, I feel like if I start doing well, people assume the worst of intentions,” he said.

Chess.com banned Kramnik in 2023 from taking part in prize tournaments after he accused multiple players of cheating, said Allebest.

Kramnik has claimed to be the “subject of a bullying and slandering PR campaign,” as well as ongoing threats to him and his family since Monday. That was when the Charlotte Chess Center in North Carolina, where Naroditsky trained and worked as a coach, announced on social media that he had died.

The Russian has also denied bullying Naroditsky and said in an email Friday that his lawyers were “preparing a major case against every media resource publishing this false information.”

Do chess players cheat?

Allebest acknowledged there is cheating in competitive chess.

“It’s just a human thing and it’s the same with any sport,” he said. “For some the rewards of winning outweigh the cost to their consciences. For some it’s monetary, although it’s rare that the prize money is that big.”

Among other things, Chess.com runs weekly online money matches where players can take home up to $3,000.

“It’s not big money,” Allebest said. “More often, players will be cheating to gain notoriety, to boost their streaming audience, to rise in the rankings and get famous by taking on the best players. It’s a perception thing.”

Those matches, he said, are also closely monitored.

“For players competing in prize money matches, we have a monitoring program called Proctor that they download that keeps track of what’s going on on their computers,” Allebest said. “We have front- and rear-facing cameras to monitor the players.”

Now that so much chess is played online, the cheating methods have also gone digital.

“They’ll use computer algorithms to determine the best move, they’ll have a second program running on their computer while the game is being played,” he said. “Sometimes they’ll have somebody sitting next to them with an iPad looking up the best moves.”

So Chess.com looks for red flags.

“We have statistical models that help us identify possible cheaters,” Allebest said. “For example, if a new player signs up and suddenly starts winning a lot of games in a row, or whose ranking starts climbing fast, or if we detect other factors that we cannot disclose, we will look into it.”

In its most recent “Fair Play Update” from September, Chess.com reported that 125,000 accounts were “closed for cheating.”

‘Painful’ allegations

Starting in October 2024, Kramnik publicly accused Naroditsky of cheating in online chess, suggesting his near-perfect play was “statistically impossible.”

Allebest said statistics don’t always tell the whole story.

“The thing that often gets forgotten is that in statistics, lightning does, sometimes, strike twice,” Allebest said. “When you have 20 million games being played every day, a one in a million chance thing happens every day. Some players, especially old-guard players who didn’t grow up playing online chess, often find that hard to understand.”

Allebest said he gets why Naroditsky, a child prodigy, might have felt despondent in the face of accusations leveled at him by a world-renowned player like Kramnik.

“It is painful for players like Danya to be accused of cheating, because since they were young they put in hours and hours and hours of work,” he said, referring to Naroditsky by his nickname. “For some, that all gets thrown into the garbage by an accusation. For players who view chess as sacred, it hurts them in the soul.”