The Stress of Elite Chess Is Wearing Down the Game’s Champions

This is how the story of a great chess grandmaster usually begins.

A parent or teacher discovers an exceptional mind: a memory of shocking precision; a special intuition for geometry; a gift for logic and abstraction. When they are introduced to the game at four or five or six, fluency comes quickly. When that talent is cultivated, others are revealed: monastic discipline, fierce competitiveness, myopic focus.

Chess, for the child, becomes everything. They are transfixed by its beauty, lured by its depth, compelled by the contest. Family, friends, hobbies—all life beyond the board begins to recede.

The kid is often taken out of school to train full time. They leave home, with or without their family, in search of richer chess cultures and stronger coaches. They argue with their coaches over little details of the game, fall out, hire new ones. With the aid of computer engines, they build an opening repertoire, a set of first moves that will unbalance their opponents. With the aid of classic manuals, they study endgames, chess’s most bedevilling puzzles.

They play and replay the games of their heroes: José Raúl Capablanca, the Cuban champion of the 1920s who achieved computer-like accuracy in the pre-computer age; Bobby Fischer, who struck a blow to the seemingly invincible Soviet chess machine, winning a Cold War proxy battle in the cool Reykjavik summer of 1972; Garry Kasparov, who in 1985 tamed a world champion with his so-called octopus knight. The child dreams of winning the game’s most prestigious events, qualifying for the world championship match, toppling the champ, feeling the weight of the wreath on their shoulders.

They train their bodies as well as their minds to meet the intense demands of a game they come to understand as a sport. Over the board, they fight. Games stretch on for hours, battles of will against other children whose identities, like their own, are tied up with winning. When they lose, they suffer. But their ability to rebound sets them apart once more. The prodigy proves again and again to be the best: in their city, in their country, on their continent.

Maybe, they think, it could be theirs: the world championship, immortality. And then, for all except one, they learn the crushing truth. Someone out there is better.

Life in chess has always been a struggle, never more so than today. During the two-year battle for the 2024 world chess championship, I saw tantrums, I saw tears, I heard one top grandmaster muse about leaving the game for a career in fashion.

In the summer of 2023, in Baku, Azerbaijan, I watched Wesley So, one of America’s top grandmasters, melt down at the board. For weeks, he had been tormented by a racing heart and spiralling thoughts—the manifestations of anxiety and emotional exhaustion, frequent afflictions among top players.

So had been a heavy favourite to place well at the World Cup in Baku. But the tournament had been a slog. Now he sat across the board from his opponent and thought about quitting chess.

His position was falling apart. A knight on the rim, the saying goes, is dim—and So’s horse, stranded on the flank, was proving the maxim. Meanwhile, his opponent’s most powerful pieces were well coordinated in the centre of the board, providing cover for a pawn as it marched inexorably into white territory, threatening to become a queen. By move fifty-three, So’s position was hopeless, and on the brink of elimination, the American resigned.

“Sometimes my mind wanders and won’t co-operate, even when I tell it to,” he told me later. “When it turns off like that, I feel stress because I don’t like to disappoint people.”

Much has been made of the supposed link between chess and mental illness. The notion of a mind tied in knots contemplating the nearly infinite possibilities of a chess game has long inspired giants of literature. In Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense, the grandmaster Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, unable to distinguish between chess and life and seeing threats everywhere, throws himself out of a window. In The Royal Game, Stefan Zweig’s Dr. B, a monastic devotee of chess, is advised by a doctor to stop playing the game, lest his obsessions overwhelm him. In Walter Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit, the world’s best player, Beth Harmon, uses drugs and booze to keep her demons at bay.

The real history of chess, too, is replete with tragic stories of lives undone by delusion and paranoia. Paul Morphy, the nineteenth-century prodigy from New Orleans, who, at twenty-one, established on a tour of Europe that he was the best player in the world, shrank from the game upon his return, becoming increasingly litigious and belligerent, consumed by fantasies that he was surrounded by those who wanted to do him harm. Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official world champion, broke down after losing his crown and never fully recovered, spending the rest of his life in one sanatorium after another. And most famously, Bobby Fischer who, after winning the world title in 1972, disappeared into a fog of conspiracy theories and hate.

Science, however, has found no link between chess and insanity. Rather, the mental health challenges players increasingly talk about are more mundane: the loneliness of life on the road, the anxiety of a high-pressure job in which worth is inextricably linked to winning, the terrible lows of defeat, and the addicting highs of victory.

So is admired in the chess community for his humility and kindness, traits he has sometimes cited as weaknesses over the board. He struggles, he says, with mental toughness, with finding the iron will one needs to be the best. Perhaps, his adoptive mother, Lotis Key, told me, So still carries trauma from his impoverished childhood in Bacoor, the small Filipino fishing village where he taught himself to play on a makeshift board with bottlecap pieces. Perhaps, she speculated, his trouble is rooted in the unique pressures of elite chess, the only sport that has no off-season and for which the rules—time controls, tournament formats—change from event to event.

“Could you imagine,” she asked me, “telling Lebron James that he’d have to play a tournament in Amsterdam where the court is thirty feet shorter and a basket is worth four points?”

Artificial intelligence has compounded the stress of chess, making constant study a prerequisite for success. Once, players would pick a few openings to specialize in—say, the Italian or the Ruy Lopez—and dare their opponents to challenge their knowledge. Today, a piece of opening preparation is obsolete the moment the game ends; the best response is just a click away. Grandmasters, therefore, have little time to do anything other than preparing, memorizing countless sequences of computer-suggested moves. For this all-consuming effort, only a handful will be rewarded with fortune. About twenty players per year earn at least $100,000 from tournaments. (A handful also have income from corporate or government sponsorships.)

Many could use their powerful analytic minds to make far more money in quantitative fields.

“The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman,” Paul Morphy is said to have remarked. “The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.” Some 150 years later, that sentiment persists among some elite players. “I wish I had chosen something (else),” said Hungarian grandmaster Richárd Rapport after a loss in 2022. “If I had put a similar amount of time and energy over the years, I think I would be a happier person.”

Yet Rapport, So, and most other top grandmasters persist in pursuit of the game’s cold and austere beauty and of fulfilling the promise, first glimpsed as children, that their exceptional talent might set them apart not only from those in their city or their country but from the whole world. That their gift might be worthy of being inscribed in history.

Another aspect of the mental health challenge for grandmasters is an atmosphere of suspicion that has always pervaded the chess world and which, in recent years, has given rise to a full-blown crisis of distrust and recrimination.

It used to be that allegations of cheating in chess were mostly either anodyne or preposterous. In the 1962 Candidates tournament, Bobby Fischer accused the Soviet players of prearranging draws with one another to preserve their energy for the fight against the young American.

Ten years later, during Fischer’s world championship match against Boris Spassky, it was Fischer who was accused of cheating. Spassky’s second issued a formal complaint about the set-up of the playing room, suggesting that the Soviet world champion “could be affected with electronics and chemical substances.” Calling the American contingent’s behaviour “suspicious,” he drew attention to a chandelier Fischer’s team had installed and the chair they had given to Spassky. The chandelier was dismantled and the chair x-rayed. Nothing was found.

Six years later, during the second game of Anatoly Karpov’s successful world championship defence against Viktor Korchnoi, Karpov was delivered a blueberry yogurt without seeming to have ordered it. Korchnoi’s team complained after the game. “It is clear,” they wrote, “that a cunningly arranged distribution of edible items to one player during the game, emanating from one delegation or the other, could convey a kind of code message.” Korchnoi later claimed the complaint was made in jest, an attempt to lampoon Karpov’s own constant objections, though the arbiter took it seriously at the time.

As chess engines surpassed humans, cheating became a more pressing threat to the integrity of the game, and allegations became yet more common. In 2006, after challenger Veselin Topalov fell behind three games to one against Vladimir Kramnik in their world championship match, Topalov’s camp accused Kramnik of consulting a chess computer in the bathroom. They could provide no evidence, and Kramnik, outraged by the baseless allegations, went on to win a decisive victory. Topalov’s story was hard to believe; the alleged method of cheating, however, would turn out to be not so far-fetched.

In 2015, at the Dubai Open, Armenian grandmaster Tigran L. Petrosian noticed his opponent, Georgian grandmaster Gaioz Nigalidze, would go to the bathroom whenever a critical position was reached. Petrosian shared his suspicions with an arbiter who discovered in a stall a smartphone hidden under some toilet paper. Nigalidze was banned for three years and stripped of his grandmaster title. Four years later, during a tournament in France, officials found a phone in a toilet stall that had just been occupied by Latvian grandmaster Igors Rausis. Rausis admitted to his transgression, saying in a statement the next day, “I simply lost my mind yesterday.” He was banned for six years and stripped of his grandmaster title. Rausis died before the ban lapsed.

Despite a steady stream of allegations, and the occasional salacious case of clear wrongdoing, cheating at the highest levels of chess was thought to be relatively rare until the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid the chess boom, with players stuck at home, more and more money events moved online, providing players new incentives and opportunities to break the rules.

In the finals of one online event hosted by Chess.com in 2020, Petrosian, the player who had ferreted out his opponent’s illicit phone use five years earlier in Dubai, won a game that aroused the suspicions of several top players. When pressed, Petrosian absurdly attributed his statistically unlikely run in the tournament to the gin he claimed to have been quaffing as he played. Some observers proposed a likelier explanation: during his games, the Armenian seemed to be frequently looking away from his computer screen, as if consulting a chess engine.

Wesley So, who had been defeated by Petrosian earlier in the event, publicly accused him of cheating, prompting a social media screed from the Armenian. “You are a biggest looser I ever seen in my life!” Petrosian wrote of So. “You was doing PIPI in your pampers when i was beating players much more stronger then you!” Chess.com, with its world-leading anti-cheating software, determined that Petrosian had indeed violated its fair play rules and banned the grandmaster from its site.

There was a sense among top players that this was not an isolated incident, that cheating, even among grandmasters, was becoming an epidemic online. But it wasn’t until nineteen-year-old American grandmaster Hans Niemann beat Magnus Carlsen in the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, ending the Norwegian’s fifty-three-game undefeated streak, that the chess world was finally forced to reckon with the problem.

After the game, Carlsen, the best player in the world, withdrew from the tournament, something he had never done before. The next day, he tweeted a video of Portuguese soccer coach José Mourinho saying, “I prefer really not to speak. If I speak, I am in big trouble.” The implication was clear, the chess world concluded: Niemann had cheated.

Two days later, Niemann gave an interview, denying that he had ever cheated over the board but admitting to having cheated using an engine in two online events, once when he was twelve, and once when he was sixteen. He said that Carlsen was trying to ruin his career, aided by Chess.com, which, after the game in St. Louis, had again banned him from the site. (Chess.com executive and international master Danny Rensch subsequently released a statement, claiming that the site “shared detailed evidence with [Niemann] concerning our decision [to ban him], including information that contradicts his statements regarding the amount and seriousness of his cheating on Chess.com.”)

Some wondered if Carlsen was simply being a sore loser. Niemann had, in recent years, cultivated the persona of a professional-wrestling villain: a brash, trash-talking teen with wild Einstein hair and no reverence for the game’s best players. After defeating Carlsen in one speed-chess tournament, he brushed off a reporter, saying, “The chess speaks for itself.” (Carlsen beat him in the next three games.) Perhaps, some speculated, Niemann had gotten under Carlsen’s skin. Perhaps the American teenager was right when he said after the game in St. Louis that, “It must be very embarrassing for him to lose to me.”

There was also the question of how, practically, Niemann could have cheated. Many players believe over-the-board cheating is extremely rare, at least in part because it is technically difficult to achieve. One would either have to be in possession of an engine, as in the case of the bathroom cheaters, or in possession of a device that would allow someone else with an engine to communicate the right moves remotely. But players are usually scanned for illicit devices as they enter the playing venue and are often scanned again after games. (One International Chess Federation, or FIDE, official told me some elite players are less co-operative than others with the fair-play staff but opined that this was likely not because they were cheaters but because they were divas.) Theories abounded about how Niemann might have pulled it off, none very plausible. After Elon Musk amplified one unfounded story, that Niemann had received electronic signals via remotely operated anal beads, the American said he would be willing to play future events naked.

Two weeks later, Niemann and Carlsen were again paired in an online tournament. Carlsen resigned after one move, apparently in protest. Asked why, he said, “Unfortunately, I cannot particularly speak on that, but people can draw their own conclusions, and they certainly have. I have to say I’m very impressed by Niemann’s play, and I think his mentor, Maxim Dlugy, must be doing a great job.” Carlsen was being ironic. Dlugy, it was later revealed, had been banned twice from Chess.com for alleged violations of the site’s fair-play rules. He denied any involvement in the Sinquefield Cup game and threatened to take legal action against Carlsen.

A few days later, having for weeks kept the chess world in a state of suspense, Carlsen finally released a statement explaining his position. He wrote that when it was announced that Niemann would be at the Sinquefield Cup, he had seriously considered withdrawing. He knew of Niemann’s past cheating and noted that the teenager’s progress in recent years had been “unusual.” (On his Twitch stream, American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura elaborated, claiming that many top grandmasters harboured suspicions about Niemann’s rise, which was “unprecedented in the history of chess.” Almost every teenager who has ever reached a rating of 2700 became a grandmaster at fourteen or fifteen before steadily ascending into the rarefied air of the super grandmasters. Niemann, however, didn’t become a grandmaster until the relatively unexceptional—for a prodigy—age of seventeen.)

Something did seem fishy about the Sinquefield Cup game, Carlsen wrote in his statement. “I had the impression that he wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do.”

Niemann responded by filing a $100 million lawsuit against Carlsen, Nakamura, and Chess.com, accusing them of “egregiously defaming him and unlawfully colluding to blacklist him from the profession to which he has dedicated his life.” The suit was later dismissed, and the parties agreed to move on without further legal action.

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But this hardly settled the matter. Carlsen’s statement had not focused primarily on the question of whether Niemann had cheated in that one game. The point he raised was bigger: Niemann had a confessed history of cheating and yet was still allowed to play in a prestigious, big-money event, which, in Carlsen’s view, undermined trust in the competition.

Cheating, Carlsen argued, is “an existential threat to the game.” “I don’t want to play against people that have cheated repeatedly in the past, because I don’t know what they are capable of doing in the future,” he wrote.

This wasn’t just about Niemann. Chess.com soon revealed that over the years, it had caught hundreds of master-level players cheating, including dozens of grandmasters and four players in the top 100. The site’s chief executive officer, Erik Allebest, called cheating “a medium problem that is a big PR problem.” But it was also a cultural problem, sowing poisonous distrust in a community whose members, as the grandmaster Levon Aronian once said, were already “pretty much paranoid.”

The former world champion, Vladimir Kramnik, who had raged in 2006 against unfounded allegations that he had cheated, embarked on his own crusade against online fraudsters. Based on his statistical analyses, he came to believe that many top players were consulting chess engines during online games. While few doubted the problem was growing, many questioned Kramnik’s statistical methods—and his practice of naming names without proof. Kramnik would often share lists, without comment, of players whose stats he deemed suspicious.

He was not making accusations, he said, just raising questions. Those named, however, felt accused.

David Navara, the Czech Republic’s top grandmaster, who is widely regarded as an honest player, wrote an essay on the toll that appearing on one of Kramnik’s lists took on his mental health. Navara pleaded with FIDE to discipline the former world champion but to no avail. The saga, he wrote, brought him to the brink of suicide.

Several months later, in October 2025, twenty-nine-year-old American grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky, who had also been caught up in Kramnik’s web of suspicion, was found dead in his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. Naroditsky was beloved in the chess world for his wit and warmth and his infectious enthusiasm for the game. As the community grieved, many also expressed anger at Kramnik. Naroditsky’s mother, Elena, said the Russian’s campaign had tormented her son in the months before his death, which authorities would later reveal had been caused by an undiagnosed heart condition, exacerbated by drug use. Few believed Naroditsky had cheated, and many wanted to see Kramnik held to account. Under pressure, FIDE announced that Kramnik’s conduct would be reviewed by the organization’s ethics committee.

The debate over Kramnik’s crusade highlighted a larger dilemma. In a climate of distrust, pressure is mounting on organizers of both over-the-board and online events to show players and fans that every precaution has been taken to eliminate any room for doubt or distrust.

The problem is that catching cheaters is hard. If certainty is the threshold for discipline, many bad actors will evade accountability. That is almost certainly happening now. If, on the other hand, a lower threshold is used—and many, including Kramnik, believe this is necessary for cleaning up chess—some non-cheaters are likely to be caught in the net, with potentially dire consequences for their careers, reputations, and mental health. The chess world faces a difficult choice.

Excerpted from Interregnum: Inside the Gruelling and Glamorous Battle to Become the Next King of Chess by Jordan Himelfarb, 2026, published by House of Anansi Press. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.