In the early afternoon of February 1st, the American chess Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura was live-streaming to some of his 1.4 million Twitch followers, deciding how to approach his next online game: “Do I play solid?” he asked from a hotel room in Berlin. “Or do I go for broke?” He was in fourth place with just two games left in a blitz tournament—quick matches in which each side gets three minutes to move—and was debating between a sturdy opening likely to result in a draw or a dynamic one. “I should try to win,” he concluded, seconds later. His opponent was Jorden van Foreest, the twenty-sixth best player in the world and an adviser to the world’s best, Magnus Carlsen. “Jorden’s being, like, uber, uber solid,” Nakamura said a few moves in, scrunching his face. “It’s kind of annoying.” He traded his knight for a bishop, exchanged knight for knight, and launched his queen into van Foreest’s position. “A draw is just not good enough,” he said. “I can’t do it, though.” Then he had an idea. “I’m gonna try to win this. It probably doesn’t work, but I’m gonna try.” With twenty seconds left, Nakamura unleashed an all-out attack, sacrificing his queen and sending forth two rooks and a bishop, coercing van Foreest’s king into a dismal retreat. “Yeah, I’m winning,” Nakamura said, with a wry smile on his face. “Chess is a tough game. . . . Chess is a tough game.”
For most players, the statement is obviously true. For Nakamura, it’s not so clear. Born in Japan and raised in White Plains, New York, he became the country’s youngest American chess master at ten and its youngest Grandmaster at fifteen, besting Bobby Fischer for both distinctions. A year later, in 2004, he won his first of five U.S. Chess Championships. Known for an attacking style and a brash, arrogant manner, Nakamura became a controversial figure in the chess world. “Are you kidding?” he muttered to his opponent during a 2007 game, channelling more pro wrestler than chess scholar. “Let’s go—come on, come on, bring it.”
Now thirty-four and possessing more emotional control, Nakamura is the most popular chess streamer on Twitch, where he is known for bulldozing top competition while answering questions from his chat, deciphering memes, and recounting move sequences in games that he played several years ago. In one Chess.com exhibition, he opened a new account, played every game with the Bongcloud Opening—a dubious second-move king advancement dubbed an “insult to chess”—and reached the site’s top forty players anyway. He has beaten several Grandmasters ten times back-to-back, a defeat so humbling that it’s referred to as an “adoption.” Simply not falling victim to one is an immense honor. “That’s it, that’s it!” the Grandmaster Eric Hansen bellowed after following nine straight losses with a win. “You are not adopting me! Not today, not today!”
It is partly because of this online notoriety that Nakamura was given a wild-card selection to the International Chess Federation (FIDE) Grand Prix, a series of three tournaments that decide two of the final spots in the Candidates Tournament—the winner of which contends for the World Championship. A former world No. 2, Nakamura had not played a classical FIDE tournament since 2019, making him ineligible. But, considering his popularity, his strong online performances, his longtime standing among the world’s best, and pandemic restrictions, the FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich gave him a pass. “The chess community will be delighted to see him sitting at a chessboard again,” he said.
Most were, but not everyone was. The Grandmaster Sergey Karjakin’s wife, Galiya Kamalova, called the FIDE wild-card selections a “clown show” and bemoaned Nakamura’s admission. “It’s like a hockey player who hasn’t skated on ice in two years, and instead played hockey online all the time, but he’s still invited to play on the country’s real team,” she wrote in a statement. “Can you imagine such a situation in Russia or Canada?” (Karjakin would later be banned from all FIDE competitions, including the Candidates, for six months, owing to his outspoken support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.) Some agreed, without using such bad analogies. Kamalova suggested the Russian Andrey Esipenko for one of the slots—an eighteen-year-old Grandmaster who had recently beaten Magnus Carlsen.
Many top chess players take pride in—and are lauded for—their extreme devotion to tournament preparation. They spend several hours a day studying chess openings, calculating minute advantages in numerous variations that can extend twenty or more moves deep. In an interview with HBO before the 2018 World Chess Championship, the American Grandmaster Fabiano Caruana claimed to have memorized millions of moves throughout his career. Nakamura, on the other hand, spent a significant amount of time in the weeks leading up to the Grand Prix expressing how little he cared. In one stream, he floated that, if he won, he might give his spot in the Candidates to the Chinese Grandmaster Ding Liren. He assured his viewers that, on the off chance he qualified for the Candidates, his stream would continue. “I’m not stopping, you guys,” he said, days before his first Grand Prix match. Measured expectations were reasonable. Nakamura had played thousands of online games, but they were almost entirely blitz and bullet matches. For the Grand Prix, each player would have ninety minutes for the first forty moves, with thirty seconds added per move. Nakamura’s relative weakness in opening preparation is rarely punished in short time controls; in classical, opponents have time to calculate the best sequence of moves to exploit a mistake.
As fate would have it, Nakamura, who did not respond to requests for an interview, was placed in the same four-person preliminary group as Esipenko, who was invited after another competitor tested positive for COVID. After a draw in his first game, Nakamura defeated the Russian phenom with the white pieces. In a YouTube recap he posted that night, he could barely contain his glee. “My strong suspicion is that Andrey was not really expecting the English Opening,” said Nakamura, who typically moves his king’s pawn first. Esipenko responded atypically, which Nakamura interpreted as an underestimation of his preparedness—“[He] figured, Well, Hikaru’s streaming all the time, probably I should surprise him.” In a sport whose top players generally strategize in private, preventing competitors from glimpsing their thought process and preparation, Nakamura spent nearly half an hour explaining his moves and expounding on possibilities he considered and didn’t end up playing even after spending hours that day at the board. “If I were his coach, I guess I would not advise him to do it,” the Grandmaster Benjamin Bok, who broadcast the tournament live on Hikaru’s Twitch channel, told me. “But, I mean, I’m only his commentator.”
Nakamura beat the crafty Hungarian Grandmaster Richárd Rapport in the first of two semifinal matches. In the video detailing his second, he explained his philosophy. “Now, one of the big differences between now and two or three years ago when I was playing chess professionally—that’s all I was doing for the most part—is that I literally don’t care,” Nakamura said. “What that means is that, in a lot of these situations now, I’ll just pick a line and play it at the board. I will not worry about trying to pick the precise line or something that I’ve looked at most recently. I will just choose to show up and play the line that I want to play.” Chess competition is stressful, and being one of the best players in the world doesn’t make it any less so. After a draw on day five of the tournament, Rapport—who won the second leg of the Grand Prix and clinched a spot in the Candidates weeks later—gave an unrelentingly brutal post-match interview, in which he called himself his toughest opponent and pondered what he could have done with his life had he not devoted it to an underfunded, unforgiving game. “I wish I had chosen something else,” Rapport said. “If I had put in a similar amount of time and energy over the years, I think I’d be a happier person as of now.”
It is only in this context that Nakamura’s “I don’t care” mantra approaches truth. Once hailed as the future of American chess, Nakamura has devoted his life to an ultracompetitive game, one that only two or three dozen people can make a comfortable living solely from playing. As he rose up the world ranks, he treated opponents like enemies and used criticism as fuel, becoming a highly disliked member of the chess scene. In online chess, where he was known for his blitz prowess since the two-thousands, he often accused opponents of cheating and fired off nasty messages after losses. The “I literally don’t care” mantra itself is a reference to Nakamura’s bitter reaction to a fluke online loss in which he repeated the phrase many more times than one would expect from someone who literally did not care.
Nakamura is not famous for his introspection, but, sometimes, in the course of hours-long streams, it comes out. “For much of my career, much of my life, I’ve sort of been the bad guy. I’m not someone who’s been liked,” he said, in August, 2020, diverting his gaze from the camera. “I’ve always been perceived as the person who people don’t want to root for, who people don’t like. So, to have all the support from you guys, to sort of know that there are fans who do support me, it does mean a lot.” In regular competitive chess, Nakamura likely gets a mental edge from knowing that, even without top results, he can still make a living from streaming sponsorships. When a single mistake during a several-hour game can lead to a quick downfall, it’s also nice to have people who wish for your success. “For the first time in his career, he has this huge fan base that’s behind him,” the Grandmaster and streamer Daniel Naroditsky told me. “And that’s giving him confidence. I think, when Hikaru’s confident, he’s absolutely unstoppable.”
After two draws in the finals, Nakamura beat Levon Aronian—the world’s fourth-best player—in two straight rapid tiebreakers. As the two stood side by side for a post-match interview, Nakamura was asked whether playing so many quick, online games contributed to his win. Acknowledging the sacrifices he made to opening preparation, Nakamura said yes. “In terms of just practically speaking, I’ve played more than anybody over the last couple years,” he offered. “I think it definitely helped, for sure.” But the main distinction, he said, is that he doesn’t panic anymore. When he got into a bad position in the final rapid game, he just found good moves. In the past, he might have thrown it away. “The biggest difference is the mind-set versus a couple years ago,” Nakamura admitted. “And just, in general, I’m a lot happier now.”
Nakamura would go on to clinch a spot in the Candidates and then proceed to post a video, “Not Caring My Way to the Candidates,” in which he energetically reviewed his final win for twenty-five minutes and thanked his fans for their support. As for whether or not he would participate in the Candidates Tournament, held this June and July, his previous ambivalence had faded. “It’s gonna be a lot of fun,” he said. “Obviously, I’m really looking forward to playing in that event.”
