An eight-year-old chess prodigy from Singapore has become the youngest chess player to defeat a grandmaster.
According to the “Singapore Star” report, 806-year-old Ashwath Kaushik performed for three hours at the Burgdorfer Stadthaus-Open in Switzerland. After defeating 37-year-old Polish grandmaster Jacek Stopa on Sunday in a chess match.
Kaushik broke the age record set just days earlier when Serbian Leonid Ivanovic (8 years and 11 months) defeated 59-year-old Bulgarian Mirko Bochev.
“It’s a very exciting and amazing feeling to be able to beat my first grandmaster on the chessboard, and it’s classical [chess] So I’m very proud of myself,” Kaushik, an Indian citizen who moved to Singapore with his family seven years ago, told The Star.
A precocious string of record-breaking starts began in Belgrade a week ago on February 12, when Ivanovic became the first player under the age of nine to defeat a classical chess master.
According to Chess.com, the competitive chess world has “recently witnessed a surge in children achieving extraordinary results at earlier ages, likely driven by the pandemic, while rating systems have not kept pace with their growth in strength.” .
Ivanovic reportedly has four points after winning three games, drawing two and losing just one. According to Chess.com, the victory made the boy the youngest player to defeat a grandmaster in a Classical tournament match.
But the record lasted less than a week.
Ashwath won his first three games against Stoppa on Sunday. But he lost his next game to Harry Grieve, the 23-year-old British player who won the 2022 British Chess Championship.
Still, Ashwath’s mother Rohini Ramachandran, 37, said she was delighted with the victory. “We were all happy, but he had to refocus quickly, so I don’t think we had much time to celebrate after the game, but when we get back home and celebrate with the whole family, we’ll definitely do something to celebrate,” she explain.
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Ashwath’s family told The Star he was four when his parents introduced him to the sport. Within months, he was beating them and other family members. He now plays chess for two hours every weekday and six to seven hours a day on weekends.
“It’s really fun and it helps your brain get better and smarter because in chess you have to think a lot to find the best moves,” he told the newspaper.
His parents said the biggest challenge was stopping their son from eating Juicy Drop candies, which can cause spikes and dips in energy.
