Daniel Naroditsky, the American chess grandmaster and streamer who cultivated the game’s digital renaissance, has died aged 29. One of modern chess’s most respected teachers and commentators, he was familiar to many players from their computer screens, where he sat in big headphones behind a microphone, his shelves packed with chess books.

The ancient game has been transformed into an e-sport in recent years, driven by the emergence of talented players and personalities like Naroditsky, who livestream their matches and lessons on the internet.

A speed-chess specialist, he had an uncanny ability to simultaneously play and talk about playing, unpicking knotty positions in real time and with a novelist’s ear for animating the board. He liked to discuss the “fertile preconditions” for an attack, describing certain opening sequences as “zesty”, or a knight fighting to protect a bishop “with its last breath”.