Eight-year-old becomes youngest chess player to beat grandmaster | Chess

An eight-year-old chess prodigy from Singapore has change into the youngest chess player to beat a grandmaster.

After a three-hour recreation of chess at Switzerland’s Burgdorfer Stadthaus-Open, Ashwath Kaushik – who’s eight and 6 months – beat the 37-year-old Polish grandmaster Jacek Stopa on Sunday, in accordance to the Singapore Star.

Kaushik broke the age report set solely days earlier than, when Leonid Ivanovic from Serbia (eight years and 11 months previous) beat the Bulgarian Milko Popchev, 59.

“It’s a very exciting feeling and amazing to be able to beat my first grandmaster on the board and it’s in classical [chess] so I feel very proud of myself,” Kaushik, an Indian citizen who moved to Singapore together with his household seven years in the past, instructed the Star.

The spate of precocious record-breaking started every week in the past on 12 February in Belgrade, when Ivanovic grew to become the primary player beneath the age of 9 to defeat a grandmaster in classical chess.

According to Chess.com, the aggressive chess world “has recently been witnessing a surge in children scoring extraordinary results at an even earlier age, perhaps propelled by the pandemic and a rating system lagging behind in keeping pace with their rise in strength”.

Ivanovic reportedly scored 4 factors after profitable three video games, drawing two and struggling only one defeat. That win made the boy the youngest player to defeat a grandmaster in a classical match recreation, in accordance to Chess.com.

But that report stood for barely every week.

On Sunday Ashwath gained his first three video games with Stopa. But he misplaced his subsequent recreation to the British player Harry Grieve, 23, who gained the 2022 British chess championship.

Still, Ashwath’s mom Rohini Ramachandran, 37, stated she was happy with the win. “We were all really happy but he had to quickly refocus so I don’t think we had a lot of time to celebrate right after the game, but we’ll definitely do some celebration when we’re back home with the whole family,” she stated.

Ashwath was 4 when his mother and father launched him to the sport, the household instructed the Star. Within a few months he was beating them and different family members. He now performs chess two hours every weekday, and 6 to seven hours a day on the weekends.

“It’s really fun and it helps your brain get better and smarter because in chess you need a lot of thinking to find the best moves,” he instructed the paper.

His mother and father stated the most important problem was stopping their son from snacking on Juicy Drop sweet which led to spikes and falls in power.