Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess by Ben Mezrich focuses on the events after the 2022 Sinquefield Cup game in which “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.”
Mezrich invented a world championship match and gave a well-known arbiter a new last name. His book is not an accurate portrayal of the chess world. But it is a rollicking read which is slated to become a Hollywood motion picture.
Magnus versus Giri for the World Chess Championship
Reviewing Mezrich’s book for The New York Times, Dylan Loeb McClain wrote, “There are also errors in the book that have nothing to do with understanding chess, a carelessness that is hard to understand.” McClain gives several examples, but not the two that I discuss in this article.
Photo by Maria Emelianova
On page 265, Mezrich compares the attention given to the Chess.com Speed Chess Championship, Paris 2024, to that given to World Chess Championship matches, including one he thought up between Carlsen and GM Anish Giri: “You would have to go back to a World Championship match on the level of a Kasparov versus Karpov, or Fischer versus Spassky, or even Magnus versus Giri, to find an event that had attracted a similar level of attention.”
Photo by Lennart Ootes; Tata Steel Chess.
Carlsen never played Giri for the World Chess Championship. Carlsen defeated World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand in 2013, and defeated Anand for the title again a year later. His next title defense was in 2016, against GM Sergey Karjakin. In 2018, he retained his title by defeating GM Fabiano Caruana. Carlsen’s last title match was his 2021 victory over GM Ian Nepomniachtchi.
Had Carlsen played Giri for the World Chess Championship, that match would have attracted more attention than the Chess.com Speed Chess Championship, Paris 2024. Giri is a social media genius.
A Bird or a Berg?
Photo by Lennart Ootes, Courtesy of Saint Louis Chess Club
The Chief Arbiter of the 2022 Sinquefield Cup was International Arbiter Chris Bird. “Bird” is a four-letter word beginning with the letter “b.” “Berg” also has four letters and starts with “b.” The two words look somewhat alike and sound similar, so maybe Mezrich misread or misheard Chris’s last name. He gives it incorrectly six times on page 160, including these three instances, “Chris Berg, an amateur chess player and longtime arbiter with the Sinquefield, was knocking on the door to the suite. He entered breathing hard, sweating through his dark blazer as Henrik [Carlsen] let him into the room. Berg was affable and bright, but from the beginning of the long conversation it was clear that he was up against a wall…. by the time Berg left the suite around midnight, Magnus was even more convinced that dropping out [of the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, after losing to Niemann] was his only course of action.”
First Stop Hollywood
Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess may become a movie, according to a story in The Hollywood Reporter. The movie rights, based on the book’s proposal, sold for seven figures in 2024. Typically, a nonfiction author writes a book proposal before writing their book. Mezrich’s book wasn’t published until 2026.
Instead of “Next Stop Hollywood” it was likely “First Stop Hollywood” for Mezrich’s chess book. Perhaps that explains the carelessness that McClain noted. For Mezrich’s bottom line, it does not matter how accurate his book is. The movie money is in the bank, regardless of his book’s quality.
It isn’t the first time Mezrich and Hollywood have intersected. According to the book’s Amazon page, Mezrich is the “bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires (adapted by Aaron Sorkin into the David Fincher film The Social Network), Bringing Down the House (adapted into the #1 box office hit film 21), The Antisocial Network, and many other bestselling books. His books have sold over six million copies worldwide.”
