Someone on Hacker News noted the other day that the chess PGN notation standard includes “death” as a termination tag,
9.8.1: Tag: Termination
This takes a string that describes the reason for the conclusion of the game. While the Result tag gives the result of the game, it does not provide any extra information and so the Termination tag is defined for this purpose.
Strings that may appear as Termination tag values:
. . .
“death”: losing player called to greater things, one hopes.
Which made me wonder . . . just how many people have died while playing chess?
It took Chess.com just 7 years to reach the one billionth game played on its service. If the average game on Chess.com takes only 10 minutes, that’s still almost 1,900 collective years spent playing chess. Surely someone (and likely a small multiple of someones) died during that time while playing a chess game online.
This Reddit thread, attempted to document some cases of individuals who died while playing chess, including a handful who were murdered as part of disputes that arose from the chess matches they were engaged in.
At the 2018 U.S. Chess Open, a participant died during the final round.