A chess super-grandmaster is playing a Dota 2 tournament, and we’re predicting nautical amounts of salt

For the first time in three years, grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi won’t play a part in the world chess championship match. Don’t worry, though, he’ll keep himself busy: for the next few days, he will occupy himself by participating in a streamer-focused Dota tournament, and he’s got quite the MOBA credentials.

Eagle-eyed redditors spotted yesterday that the eighth edition of BetBoom’s Streamers Battle Dota 2 will feature a player familiar to a different clan of nerds: playing under the Goodwin Team banner is none other than the world’s eight-highest-ranked chess player and back-to-back challenger for the classical world championship title, Ian Nepomniachtchi.

While the tournament does tend to feature the occasional celebrity, Nepo, as chess players lacking keyboard skills like to call him, actually has a pretty impressive gaming background. (In 2021, he called himself the least hard-working player in the chess elite, which might have something to do with this other fact we’ve just mentioned.) The Russian super-GM is a bona fide Dota 2 tournament winner from back in 2011, winning the ASUS Winter Open ahead of teams like NAVI, playing under the name BloodAngel.

Nepomniachtchi also spent some time with Hearthstone, introducing fellow Russian grandmaster Peter Svidler to the card game, who has also taken to occasionally streaming the game for a while. Nepo’s racked up some notable high ladder finishes in Blizzard’s card game but never actually participated in an elite LAN event. We understand: Playing chess at a high level takes a lot of time. Also, Dota. We get that, too. This might also explain his occasional salty outbursts and supposed cheating accusations.

Nepomniachtchi is also not the only esports player with big-ticket chess accomplishments: Mongolian Counter-Strike player Garidmagnai “bLitz” Byambasuren, the in-game leader of The MongolZ, boasts a 2369 standard Elo and the FIDE Master title. While a far cry from Nepo’s 2755, it still puts him near the top 4,000 players on the planet.

As for the eighth edition of BetBoom’s Streamers Battle, which also features personalities like Sheever and footballer Aleksandr Golovin, you can check out the official YouTube broadcast and NarodCast on Twitch—just be sure to get a Russian dictionary for the best results. Meanwhile, we’ll leave the upcoming world chess championship match to Ding Liren and Dommaraju Gukesh.