After a three-hour match at the Swiss Burgdorfer Stadthaus tournament, the time had come. Polish grandmaster Jacek Stopa (37) had to bow his head to his opponent. He even had to bow extra deeply for this, because the opponent was a boy of eight years and six months. This makes Ashwath Kaushik the youngest chess player ever to defeat a grandmaster.
“This is a great feeling,” Kaushik said in Singapore media. “I’m so proud of myself.” He learned the ‘game’ just four years ago and now plays chess every day: two hours on weekdays and six to seven hours on weekends. “It’s a lot of fun and it makes you smarter, because you have to think carefully about the best move.”
Child prodigies
Kaushik’s spectacular victory also meant that another eight-year-old could once again set his brand new record. Barely a week ago, Serbian Leonid Ivanovic defeated another grandmaster, 59-year-old Milko Popchev. At the age of eight years, eleven months and seven days, Ivanovic thought he had secured a place in chess history. But Kaushik is five months younger, and therefore the new record holder… as long as no even younger top player emerges, of course.
Ashwath and Leonid are not the first child prodigies to storm the chess world in recent months. In December, London’s Bodhana Sivananandan finished third (and first woman) at a European championship. She was also… eight years old at the time. (read more below the photo)
School chess is also becoming increasingly popular. (archive image) — © photo Joren De Weerdt
Four year olds
“This has not been a coincidence for a long time,” says Gert Devreese, chess journalist at De Standaard. “We have seen for decades how younger and younger players are delivering great performances. It used to cause a stir when a twelve-year-old became a grandmaster, but now hardly anyone is surprised. At the top of the world rankings is a whole generation of teenagers, especially Indians. In the past, a chess player reached the top around the age of 25, but now it’s all about seventeen year olds.”
The main explanation? The Internet. “In the past you had to register with a chess club to learn it properly, but now there are many online courses and it is also alive on social media. The young generation can also work with it easily and learn much faster than we did with our books at the time. Some people start playing chess at the age of four, and then you obviously have a head start. Every year of additional experience is taken into account.”
Corona and Netflix
The corona crisis has also accelerated this process, Devreese suspects. “Chess was one of the few sports you were still allowed to practice. Although not physically against each other, but online, against a living player. Hundreds of thousands of people were playing chess around the clock on sites such as Chess.com and Lichess.org. Add to that the popular Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, and you got a boost that the chess world continues to benefit from.”
The cliché of old man sport no longer applies to us either. “Modern and younger players are joining the clubs. I recently competed against an eight-year-old twice during a speed chess tournament. And yes, I have been playing chess fifty years longer than him, but I lost.”