The story was reported by Nicholas Kristof in the "New York Times", and rapidly attracted national and international attention both inside and outside the chess world. agadmator, a leading YouTube chess streamer, published an analysis of Adewumi's only available game from the tournament. Garry Kasparov, former World Chess Champion, praised this achievement by a refugee immigrant. Bill Clinton, former U.S. president, invited him to visit him in his office in Harlem, New York, and he did. Abike Dabiri, Senior Special Assistant on Foreign Affairs and Diaspora to Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, called him "a pride to the nation". On March 30, 2019, he visited the Saint Louis Chess Club in Missouri, where the U.S. Chess Championship was then in progress, and played several friendly blitz (5 minutes for each player) games, his opponents including Hikaru Nakamura (GM, five-time U.S. Chess Champion), Jennifer Yu (WGM, 2019 U.S. Women's Chess Champion), and Fabiano Caruana (GM, who had challenged the titleholder, Magnus Carlsen, for the World Chess Championship in November 2018), and was interviewed by Maurice Ashley, the world's first black GM.