Vladimir Kramnik, a former teacher of D Gukesh, is known for his outspoken personality in online chess forums and social media. The chess legend is known for getting angry after losing games and then reporting or blocking his opponents without any evidence. In the past, Kramnik has also accused Gukesh and Indian grandmaster Nihal Sarin of cheating, but hasn’t been able to prove his statements.

Kramnik has a long history with World No. 3 Hikaru Nakamura. It all starts from a match when a young Nakamura defeated Kramnik, and the former didn’t receive a good reaction from the latter. Kramnik has also accused Nakamura of cheating in his online chess.com games, which has been vehemently denied by the platform and Nakamura.

Chess.com even used a statistics professor to make a report and analyse Nakamura’s online games, and it was revealed that he never cheated. Kramnik had a different take on the report, and criticised it.

Nakamura was in poor form at the World Rapid Championships, which was won by Grandmaster Volodar Murzin, who also became the second-youngest rapid world champion in history.

Taking to X, Kramnik took a dig at Nakamura’s performance and subtly compared it with his online winning streaks. “Uh, playing without magic home chair, it hurts”, Kramnik wrote, in reference to Nakamura live streaming his online chess.com matches. He also shared a photo of Nakamura’s performance.

“Even though there must be a bar in the playing hall as well,” he added.

In another post, he wrote, “The hall of fame performances from major @chesscom and most of titled tiesdays “heroes we deserve” Page 1.”

Nakamura is a five-time US Chess Champion and the defending World Fischer Random Chess Champion. At the age of 15, he achieved the title of grandmaster which made him the youngest American at the time to do so. The 37-year-old has a peak rating of 2816, which makes him the tenth-highest-rater player in history.