An eight-year-old chess prodigy from Singapore, Ashwath Kaushik, has become the youngest chess player to beat a grandmaster.
After a three-hour chess game at Switzerland’s Burgdorfer Stadthaus-Open, Ashwath Kaushik, who is eight and six months old, beat the 37-year-old Polish grandmaster Jacek Stopa on Sunday, according to the Star.
Kaushik broke the age record set only days before, when Leonid Ivanovic from Serbia (eight years and 11 months old) 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 with his family seven years ago, told the Star.
The spate of precocious record-breaking began a week ago on February 12 in Belgrade, when Ivanovic became the first player under the age of nine to defeat a grandmaster in classical chess.
According to Chess.com, children are now scoring extraordinary results at an even younger age, possibly as a result of the pandemic and a rating system that isn’t keeping up with their increase in strength.
Ivanovic reportedly scored four points after winning three games, drawing two and suffering just one defeat. That win made the boy the youngest player to defeat a grandmaster in a classical tournament game, according to Chess.com.
But that record stood for barely a week.
On Sunday, Ashwath won his first three games with Stopa. But he lost his next game to the British player Harry Grieve, 23, who won the 2022 British chess championship.
Nonetheless, 37-year-old Rohini Ramachandran, Ashwath’s mother, expressed her satisfaction with the victory. “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 said.
Ashwath was four when his parents introduced him to the game, the family told the Star. Within a couple of months, he was beating them and other members of the family. He now plays chess for two hours each weekday, and six 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 told the paper.
His parents said the biggest challenge was stopping their son from snacking on Juicy Drop candy, which led to spikes and falls in energy.
