Darius Parvin ⚡️

I’m not usually affected by the deaths of people I don’t know personally, but this one hurts. Chess Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky has passed away, aged 29. I never met him, but I’ve spent hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours watching his videos. I got back into chess during the Covid lockdowns, and I wouldn’t have fallen in love with the game without his generous, witty, and instructive lessons. A history graduate from Stanford, Naroditsky was the most articulate and lucid commentator and teacher in chess. He was rare: a Twitch streamer and YouTube creator without a hint of ego. Everything he did was in the service of the game he loved. He knew how to instruct weaker players like me. Commonly in his videos he’d say “you might be tempted to play…” followed by the exact terrible move I would have played, and then he’d explain why it was so bad. I hear his voice and his idioms in my head when I play: is the opponent’s threat genuine or only a “paper tiger”? Can you set up a defence so that the opponent’s attack is “biting on granite”? Can you see a follow-up to your “sexy move” or have you succumbed to “onemove-itis?” I’ll never be able to play as well as he did, but his videos always gave the impression that, with enough patience and effort, one day I might be able to. It might be strange to have a teacher younger than you, but it’s even stranger to find out that he’s gone. Remember Philip Larkin’s lines at the end of his poem “The Mower”: "we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time." Memory eternal