CHECKMATE

Inside a cheating allegation that rocked the high-stress, big-money world of competitive chess.

Mezrich’s niche is stories about the intersection of technology, money, and bad behavior, including the founding of Facebook (The Accidental Billionaires, 2009), the GameStop short-selling affair (The Antisocial Network, 2021), and Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover (Breaking Twitter, 2023). Here, Mezrich untangles the contretemps between Magnus Carlsen, the world’s best chess player, and Hans Niemann, an upstart climbing the ranks. At a high-profile 2022 match in St. Louis, Niemann bested Carlsen in ways that raised Carlsen’s suspicions. Niemann had been caught cheating before—years earlier, as a teenager, he was briefly suspended from the site Chess.com for using AI to feed him optimal moves. But Niemann denied cheating in “over-the-board” games, and the debate ultimately spilled over into social media and the courts. (Niemann sued Carlsen, Chess.com, and others for defamation, seeking $100 million in damages; the matter was settled in 2023.) Mezrich’s treatment of the story is thorough, with entertaining digressions into the nature of chess cheating. But he overhypes the drama; taking his cues from the game’s black-and-white conflict, he depicts Carlsen as the sober, honorable grandmaster and Niemann as the belligerent loose cannon. (Chess.com plays the referee; though given the site’s financial arrangements with Carlsen, its impartiality was also questioned.) Mezrich also deploys a few cartoonish gimmicks (larding one chapter about an internet troll with Beatles lyrics simply because said troll was from Liverpool, England); dramatic cascading sentence fragments; and weaving himself as a character in the story. Chess and cheating is life-and-death stuff—in October 2025, grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky died at age 29 after cheating allegations—but Mezrich’s style is to treat it more like a sideshow.

A gaming story with lots of drama but needing more gravitas.