I don’t think it’s wordplay or for that matter anything rising to a “claim” to say that the chess engine doesn’t in any sense care if it wins or loses, any more than it would care if you were stupid enough to tie your life to beating it.
If the only path it saw to cheat to win was to kill you and move your pieces for you, there's nothing stopping it from doing so.
Will it kill you because it wants to kill you? No. Might it kill you because killing you is a possible option and that option comes out as a likely way for it to achieve what it wants? Absolutely.
Probabilities matter. Is killing you the best way to win at chess? I have no idea, it depends on too many variables. But it's certainly less likely than if it were programmed to kill you as its goal.
However, as its power to affect the world goes up, it becomes more and more capable of performing actions which accidentally kill you while it pursues an endgame (pardon the pun). Like flooding the town you live in so you can't move, or whatever.