By Nihal Sarin

I never got to meet Naroditsky in person. He hardly played much classical chess and hardly travelled outside the US, and I’ve never been to the US. But I knew him pretty well.

We played a lot of games, and he was a great guy. He was a very positive guy, and one of the smartest. You could just feel it from the way he spoke. It was heartbreaking to hear the news.

Naroditsky’s last games on chess.com were against me. That day, we had played a bit in the morning, and the last games were at night. We were also talking about a few things. He said he was under immense stress due to a lot of accusations, from Kramnik. But apparently quite a few others seemed to have joined in. I can imagine the pain he was going through for a very long time and the toll on his mental health, but

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