Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess by Ben Mezrich [Book Review]

Competitive chess has never felt this scandalous. Checkmate turns ambition, ego, and one explosive cheating accusation into a nonfiction thriller that’s nearly impossible to put down.

I never expected to describe a book about competitive chess as fast, scandalous, and occasionally unhinged. And yet…

Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess by Ben Mezrich (most famous for The Social Network) takes one of the stranger sports controversies in recent memory and turns it into a high-velocity story about ambition, ego, money, and the dangerous appeal of a really good accusation.

The Match That Started Everything

In September 2022, nineteen-year-old American chess prodigy Hans Niemann defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen at the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, MO. Which was incredibly surprising.

Within days, Carlsen accused Niemann of cheating — setting off an international scandal involving Chess.com, competitive chess officials, online investigators, and the entire community. The chess world had not seen anything like it.

One question prevailed: Did Hans Niemann cheat?

The accusation quickly became bigger than one game. It raised questions about Niemann’s history, Carlsen’s power, Chess.com’s influence, and whether anyone could actually prove what happened. And the accusations are all over the place. At one point, there is a discussion about whether anal beads were involved… yep.

Ben Mezrich Makes Chess Feel Dangerous

I love it when Mezrich takes on nonfiction because he writes it with the urgency of a thriller. His books don’t feel like someone walking you through a collection of facts. They feel like stories populated by ambitious, complicated people making risky or poor decisions that could ruin their lives.

Checkmate gets a little meta near the end — I don’t want to ruin it for you, but you’ll understand when you get there. It wasn’t strictly necessary; the material was already compelling on its own. But I got over it in about thirty seconds and kept going.

Apparently, Chess Has Drama

Mezrich presents competitive chess as an ecosystem of rivalries, pride, enormous intelligence, and even larger egos. These are brilliant people who have spent years learning to anticipate an opponent’s every move. Magnus Carlsen is a legacy trying to protect itself. Hans Niemann is a wildly ambitious young player trying to make a name for himself… fast. And Chess.com is a powerful company with a billion-dollar stake in defining what modern chess looks like.

Everyone has something to protect. That’s where this stops being a quirky chess scandal and becomes a story about status, legitimacy, and control.

Would I Recommend Checkmate?

Yes. Whether you follow competitive chess or not. Checkmate is so readable, so full of modern chess-world chaos, that it’s hard to imagine a more entertaining way to revisit the whole mess.

Media Notes: If you haven’t seen the Netflix documentary, it’s a less in-depth version of events, but still worth your time. And it sounds like Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder, and A24 are already working on the fictional movie adaptation.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for an advanced reader’s copy; all opinions expressed are my own.

Find me on Goodreads, Fable, and StoryGraph.