American GM Hikaru Nakamura shared his opinion after watching the Netflix documentary “UNTOLD: Chess Mates.” Nakamura says he wasn’t impressed with the film, and notes that Netflix didn’t pay those interviewed for the documentary.

Hikaru Nakamura

Hikaru Nakamura

American GM

“I was bored a few days ago. I decided to actually watch that documentary with Niemann on Netflix. But at 1.5x speed, I just literally couldn’t listen to it at normal speed.

I was not very impressed by it… I gave the team at Netflix, the people who made the show, a full day. They had over eight hours of footage of me talking about a lot of different things. And I was in the final cut for about three minutes… I was kind of surprised and confused honestly.

And also, I’ve seen people act like we’re getting paid for the participation… Nobody’s getting paid. There’s no money going to anybody for doing this at all!”

“UNTOLD: Chess Mates” is a Netflix documentary about the 2022 cheating scandal involving Magnus Carlsen and Hans Moke Niemann. The documentary centers on Niemann’s victory over Carlsen at the Sinquefield Cup and the cheating allegations that followed. The film was criticized by the chess community upon its release in April.

Credit: Netflix