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<\/a>, which might have something to do with this other fact we\u2019ve just mentioned.) The Russian super-GM is a bona fide Dota 2 <\/em>tournament winner from back in 2011, winning the ASUS Winter Open<\/a> ahead of teams like NAVI, playing under the name BloodAngel.<\/p>
Nepomniachtchi also spent some time with Hearthstone<\/a><\/em>, introducing fellow Russian grandmaster Peter Svidler to the card game, who has also taken to occasionally streaming the game for a while. Nepo\u2019s racked up some notable high ladder finishes in Blizzard\u2019s 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<\/em>. We get that, too. This might also explain his occasional salty outbursts and supposed cheating accusations<\/a>.<\/p>
Nepomniachtchi is also not the only esports player with big-ticket chess accomplishments: Mongolian Counter-Strike <\/em>player Garidmagnai “bLitz” Byambasuren, the in-game leader of The MongolZ, boasts a 2369 standard Elo and the FIDE Mast<\/a>e<\/a>r title<\/a>. While a far cry from Nepo\u2019s 2755, it still puts him near the top 4,000 players on the planet.<\/p>
As for the eighth edition of BetBoom\u2019s Streamers Battle, which also features personalities like Sheever and footballer Aleksandr Golovin, you can check out the official YouTube broadcast<\/a> and NarodCast on Twitch<\/a>\u2014just be sure to get a Russian dictionary for the best results. Meanwhile, we’ll leave the upcoming world chess championship match <\/a>to Ding Liren and Dommaraju Gukesh.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
