It started, as these things always do now, with a stat. “8 moves in. Carlsen at 99% accuracy,” posted @TakeTakeTakeApp, the chaos concierge of chess Twitter.

https://x.com/anishgiri/status/1913907875061096483 (https://x.com/anishgiri/status/1913907875061096483)

Anish Giri — Grandmaster, Dutch #1, and widely regarded as the driest man alive in a good way — quote-tweeted it with a light jab:
“Glad @VBkramnik is there to witness this feat in person!”

If you know, you know. If you don’t, here’s the summary: Vladimir Kramnik, former World Champion and current online fair-play watchdog, has spent the past year warning anyone who will listen that elite chess is starting to look… suspicious. As in: disturbingly engine-like. He’s not naming names, but he’s also not not naming names.

So Giri’s tweet? A well-placed nudge. Not hostile.

But Kramnik does not do nudges. He replies with what might best be described as a gentle manifesto:

“The mafia constantly repeating this ‘joke’ for over a year… cheap PR tricks… fooling their major audience who doesn’t have a clue…”

And just like that, we’re off.

Except it’s not a fight. It’s something more interesting: a subtle, increasingly public disagreement about what the chess world is even looking at anymore.

On one side: Giri, who doesn’t deny that cheating exists, but seems more concerned with how narratives are being spun and who gets to spin them. His casual follow-up? That no one — mafia or anti-mafia — has bothered explaining why the Paris event was quietly pulled.

On the other: Kramnik, who sees the very structure of the game being eroded by statistics like “99% accuracy” being used without nuance or context. To him, this isn’t just a number — it’s the PR arm of a larger campaign to normalize play that no longer looks human.

Both are right.

The 99% stat is almost meaningless without context (early openings are memorized, everyone calm down). But Kramnik’s not hallucinating either — trust in fair play has taken some real dents, and the chess world hasn’t exactly been transparent about how it’s handling them.

So what looked like a throwaway tweet turned into a Rorschach test:
Giri saw spin. Kramnik saw rot. And the fans, once again, were left watching two top players gesture at a much deeper conversation that no one wants to actually have out loud.

Editor’s Note: World Chess will be launching a dedicated media project later this year. In the meantime, we’ll be publishing select stories, commentary, and dispatches right here. Stay tuned.