US chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky suffered cardiac issues after taking kratom and meth, according to a detailed medical examiner’s report that ruled the 29-year-old’s death an accident.
Friends found Naroditsky on his living room couch with bags of kratom powder and over-the-counter cough medicine strewn around his Charlotte, North Carolina, home on Oct. 19, 2025.
They had performed the wellness check after becoming concerned when Naroditsky missed a scheduled flight to Colorado.
Two days earlier, the same friends had come over due to their alarm about his “concerning altered mental status,” during a chess livestream, the medical examiner’s report said.
There, they had “confiscated” around 40 pills believed to be Adderall before leaving the house, according to the report.
Naroditsky, a chess prodigy, had been under significant “stress” due to “cheating allegations leveled against him by a prominent international chess figure over the previous year,” the report added.
Naroditsky had been desperate to return to professional chess to dispel the false accusations that he and other top players were cheating using computer “chess engines,” his mother, Elena, said at the time of his death.
“There was nothing more important to Daniel than his dignity and his name as a chess player,” she told the Daily Mail.
Former chess world champion, Russian player Vladimir Kramnik, had been among the prominent players accusing Naroditsky and others of cheating.
Despite the pressure of the allegations, Elena said her son had been eager to prove he wasn’t cheating, and that the majority of the chess world did not believe Kramnik’s accusations.
“Daniel tried to defend himself so much. The whole world was on Daniel’s side. He played more and did more and more because he was trying to prove that he’s not what he was accused of,” she said.
The week after his death, Naroditsky had been planning to visit his family in the Bay Area, Elena added.
The last person to see the chess prodigy alive was a DoorDash delivery driver who brought food to his address at around 3 p.m. the day before.
The partially-eaten food was still on his dining room table when emergency responders arrived.
His death was a result of probable cardiac arrhythmia due to probable cardiac involvement of systemic sarcoidosis, according to the medical examiner’s report.
The presence of methamphetamine and kratom in his system both contributed to his accidental death, the report stated.
Kratom is a supplement sold as an energy booster, pain reliever, and mood lifter.
The FDA warns it can cause trouble breathing, high blood pressure, liver damage, depression, hallucinations, and, in a small number of cases, death.
Additional reporting by David Propper
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