The first time the 11-year-old Argentine Faustino Oro caught my full attention was during the Rapid and Blitz World Team Championships, held in London in June of this year, when the English grandmaster David Howell asked him when he wanted to become world champion.
It was amusing to see how Faustino, neatly dressed in a jacket, which you don’t often see on 11-year-olds anymore, answered the question. He wasn’t surprised and took some time, with the seriousness of someone solving a math problem. “In 2032, maybe?” he said. By then he will be 18, the same age as Gukesh when he became world champion last year.
Last month Faustino took a small step towards his big goal. In Madrid he won a tournament that was called Legends & Prodigies, and on the way he scored his first grandmaster norm. The only player to have done so at a slightly younger age was the current world champion Gukesh.
But the youngest grandmaster of all time is not Gukesh, but the American Abhimanyu Mishra, who gained the title in 2021 when he was 12 years and 5 months old. At the time there were some disparaging remarks, because his father had rushed him to European tournaments designed for scoring norms.
I also had my doubts, but then I saw Mishra in a ChessBase video with the German endgame expert Karsten Müller, and I realized that though I used to be a pretty good chess player myself and had defeated gods and demi-gods, this 12-year-old boy knew more about rook endgames than I ever did.
Mishra, now 16, has currently played 67 consecutive games at classical time control without defeat, a tremendous achievement. In the recent FIDE Grand Swiss in Samarkand he finished one point behind the winner, Anish Giri.
The victory of my compatriot Giri, which gained him a place in the next candidates’ tournament in 2026, brought me joy. He had participated in the Moscow 2016 Candidates’ and Yekaterinburg 2020/2021, a tournament interrupted by covid measures. Giri had scored quite decently but had not been a prominent contender in the fight for first place. This time I expect him to do better.
To come back to Mishra, still young but now a seasoned top player, if he had won in the last round instead of drawing, he would have qualified for the candidates, as he had the best tiebreak of all the participants.
Mishra set another record in that tournament in Samarkand. He became the youngest player ever to beat a world champion. Against Gukesh, he sacrificed a piece for a couple of pawns on the thirteenth move and, after a long battle, won a rook endgame after 61 moves.
A video showed Mishra shaking with hands, head, and body towards the end. You could also see how correctly these young players behaved after the game. Gukesh did not look happy, but he shook hands with Mishra politely, signed his score sheet, and when he walked outside, he even found the time to sign the chess books that some children had brought with them. There are great players who would have reacted differently.
The child that everyone was watching was of course the youngest participant, Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, 14, from Turkey. He scored 6 out of 11 and showed that he can compete at the highest level. He drew against the world champion, beat Levon Aronian, and won a wild game against Aditya Mittal, 18, from India, which the English commentator Daniel King called the Turkish Immortal.
The final position, in which White, with the enormous material superiority of two queens against a rook, is checkmated, is worthy of being captured by an artist, and I believe that has already happened.
Click here to view Mittal-Erdogmus, Samarkand 025