Fabiano Caruana, one of the world’s top grandmasters, starts a major tournament at 135 pounds. He ends it at around 120. Over ten days of sitting at a board, barely moving, he loses fifteen pounds. He’s not unusual. The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds and, in the words of one commentator, looked like death.
This is the first thing most people don’t know about elite chess: it is a physically brutal sport. Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has estimated that grandmasters can burn up to 6,000 calories per day during tournaments — three times the average person’s daily intake — driven by stress responses that cause breathing rates to triple, blood pressure to spike, and muscle contractions to run continuously. A 2018 tournament study found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov burned 560 calories in two hours of seated play — roughly what Roger Federer burns in an hour of singles tennis. The body, it turns out, does not distinguish between running a marathon and spending eight hours trying to see twelve moves ahead.
The Mind Eating Itself
A new book excerpt published in The Walrus — drawn from journalist Jordan Himelfarb’s Interregnum, about the battle to become the next world chess champion — goes deeper into what this pressure does to elite players over a career.
The psychological toll is distinct from the physical one. Chess prodigies are typically identified young, pulled from school to train full time, and socialized almost entirely within chess culture — stripped of the ordinary experiences that build resilience elsewhere. The game becomes everything. Wesley So, a top American grandmaster, suffered an anxiety-driven breakdown at the 2023 World Cup and seriously contemplated quitting. He’s not an outlier — he’s an illustration of a system that extracts everything from its practitioners and offers little psychological support in return.
When the Game Turns on Its Own
Himelfarb’s book arrives in the aftermath of one of the most devastating episodes in chess’s recent history. In 2024, former world champion Vladimir Kramnik began publicly accusing elite online players of cheating, publishing statistical analyses and naming names without definitive proof. His targets included Czech grandmaster David Navara and American grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky, both widely regarded as honest players.
Navara wrote publicly that the accusations brought him to the brink of suicide. In October 2025, Naroditsky — known to fans as Danya, beloved in the chess community for his warmth and his popular YouTube teaching channel — was found dead at 29 in his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. Authorities later determined the cause as an undiagnosed heart condition exacerbated by drug use. His mother, Elena, said Kramnik’s campaign had tormented her son in the months before his death. In his final Twitch stream, Naroditsky described the accusation in terms that made plain what was at stake: “If I knew that some of the most influential movers and shakers of the chess world would carry the notion that I am a completely morally bankrupt individual, that would represent the complete failure of literally everything — my reason for waking up in the morning.”
FIDE, the game’s governing body, announced an ethics investigation into Kramnik. A petition to revoke his grandmaster title has gathered over 54,000 signatures. Kramnik has denied wrongdoing and announced plans to sue FIDE.
The Impossible Problem
The cheating dilemma at the center of all this has no clean resolution, and Himelfarb doesn’t pretend otherwise. Chess engines have been superhuman for two decades. Smartphones are small. Detection relies on probabilistic analysis of move accuracy — which means it can never be conclusive, only suggestive.
If the threshold for discipline requires certainty, genuine cheaters escape. If the threshold is lowered, the innocent get swept in — with consequences, as the last year has made clear, that can be career-ending or worse. Magnus Carlsen has called cheating an existential threat to the game. The Kramnik saga has demonstrated that the campaign against it can become one too.
A Game That Takes Everything
Elite chess has always demanded extraordinary sacrifice. What’s changed is visibility. Grandmasters now have streaming channels and parasocial fan bases — their suffering is public in a way it wasn’t when championships happened in closed rooms. The pressures haven’t increased; the historical record of broken champions suggests they were always there. What’s new is that we can watch it happen in real time.