Checkmate : genius, lies, ambition, and the biggest scandal in chess / Ben Mezrich.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"The best black-and-white drama this side of Chess on Broadway." - Vanity Fair



From the bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House comes the cinematic true story about the biggest scandal in modern chess.



In September 2022, the unthinkable happened: nineteen-year-old American chess prodigy Hans Niemann defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen in a stunning face-to-face match. Within days, Carlsen accused Niemann of cheating--a bombshell allegation that rocked the chess world. As the scandal spiraled, Chess.com--the dominant force in online chess--launched a high-stakes investigation igniting a global media firestorm.



But Checkmate is about more than a cheating scandal. It's the story of a teenager willing to risk everything to rise to the top; a reclusive genius suddenly fighting to protect his legacy; and a centuries-old game transforming into a billion-dollar industry fueled by streaming, sponsorships, and Silicon Valley power players.



With exclusive access to the central figures, Ben Mezrich takes readers deep inside the weird, wild, and cutthroat world of competitive chess--where genius meets ambition, and every move could be your last.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Bestseller Mezrich (Breaking Twitter) offers a gripping investigation into a 2022 cheating scandal that stunned the competitive chess world. The book opens with the now infamous upset at America's "most prestigious" tournament, the Sinquefield Cup, in which 19-year-old "enfant terrible" Hans Niemann beat world champion Magnus Carlsen, leading Carlsen to accuse Niemann of cheating. The author traces the two players' divergent ascents--Carlsen became the youngest ever grandmaster at age 13 with the support of a committed father; while alienated, struggling Niemann became "notorious for baiting... his opponents." The author also tracks the growth of Chess.com from an upstart gaming site dismissed by Peter Thiel ("There's no money in chess") to a billion-dollar valuation. The two threads combine as Mezrich traces Niemann's response to the post-Sinquefield fallout, which evolved from public boasts ("It must be embarrassing for the world champion to lose to me") to defiant paranoia, as he comes to believe Carlsen and Chess.com, who had just struck an $80 million deal, conspired "to destroy him." While Niemann admitted to cheating in online games--he had once been caught by Chess.com's algorithm and suspended--he maintained that his over-the-board games were legit. The controversy deliciously spirals to include hotheaded interviews, threats in parking lots, and a staggering $100 million lawsuit. It's an epic, swirling melodrama of hubris, money, and tech. (June)

Booklist Review

Mezrich, an accomplished narrative nonfiction writer, has had some previous books made into feature films such as 21 (2008) and Dumb Money (2023). In his latest project, he presents the dramatic account of a recent scandal in the world of competitive chess. The global chess market is a billion-dollar industry, and the best players attain near-rock-star status with sponsorships and endorsements. In 2022, Magnus Carlsen, the top-ranked player in the world, was stunned in a loss to lesser-ranked teenager Hans Niemann. Carlsen accused the brash Niemann of cheating, which set off a firestorm in the chess community. Online chess exploded during the pandemic and engines like chess.com evolved into huge players in the industry. Unfortunately, the rise of sophisticated chess algorithms created opportunities for cheating, and monitoring for such issues has become a continuous battle. Mezrich pieces together interviews and extensive research with cinematic flair to create an enticing and entertaining story of burgeoning egos fighting for supremacy and legitimacy in a game that has fascinated players and enthusiasts for over 1,500 years.

Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.