12-year-old ‘Messi of Chess’ eyes youngest grandmaster record, but undaunted by pressure
For a boy knocking on the doors of history, Faustino Oro is remarkably nonchalant about the pressures of expectations that come along with being too good too early in his career. Having ticked off his first Grand Master norm and crossed the 2500 rating threshold a fortnight ago at the Legends & Prodigies tournament in Madrid, Oro finds himself just two norms away from being the youngest grandmaster in history, a record which currently belongs to Indian-origin prodigy Abhimanyu Mishra. Oro still has five months to break Mishra’s record. The chase of becoming the youngest Grand Master in history has infamously been known to do strange things to the form of prodigies in the past. But Oro dismisses any talk of pressure with a shrug and a smile. While speaking to The Indian Express from his home in Badalona, Oro said, “There is no pressure about the record. Like I say in all my interviews, I try to play my best chess and enjoy chess. For me, it’s a sport.” The 12-year-old prodigy added, “I am not focusing on the record of being the youngest grandmaster in history. I will try to do that, obviously. But I am more focused on playing my style of chess and trying to improve a bit more every day. And well, if I improve a bit more each day, the grandmaster title will appear.” Oro was introduced to chess by his father at the age of six, Alejandro, to prevent the restless boy of six from kicking the football against walls for hours at a stretch while they were in COVID lockdown. In these six years, he’s already become the world’s youngest international master (a record now broken), the youngest player ever to cross 2500 rating, and the second youngest to earn a Grandmaster norm. He’s also defeated players like Magnus Carlsen thrice, and Hikaru Nakamura in online games besides playing against five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand in exhibition games.
Praggnanandhaa’s hilarious anecdote: After listening to the news of triumph over Carlsen, my father said ‘good’ and went back to sleep!
The historic triumph over Magnus Carlsen always becomes special and brings celebration and higher recognition from important people in a country like India. It was no different for chess prodigy R. Praggnanandhaa when he trumped the Norwegian chess king at 16. Praggnanandhaa recently shared a hilarious anecdote of what happened when he defeated Carlsen for the first time in 2022 in an online chess game. It was that game that made Praggnanandhaa a household name in India, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar among those who posted congratulatory messages on X. But back in Praggnanandhaa’s own home, the reaction was much more muted. “Since it was 2 am in the night, at that time my parents were asleep. I went and woke my dad up and said, ‘I won’. He said, ‘Good,’ and then he went back to sleep because he had to go to the office the next day,” Praggnanandhaa said on Raj Shamani’s Figuring Out podcast. Asked what he was thinking, Praggnanandhaa said: “I wasn’t thinking anything. I was just playing, and I got my chance out of nowhere. Everything happened in like a few minutes. It was an online rapid game. I was quite happy. “I was just excited, like I wasn’t expecting it, and then suddenly… I mean, the game was also going in a trend where he was putting pressure on me, and then suddenly I got my chance. I had to play some accurate moves, which I did, and I won. So, I was just very happy, and then I also didn’t expect so much reaction from outside after that. So that was also, I think, a good thing for the game. I think it brought more attention,” Pragnanandhaa added. “I was more excited about the fact that I just beat Magnus than the actual game. I didn’t think the game was particularly great or anything like that. I did analyze it later. I realized I didn’t play well. It was like the fifth game of the day or something. We were already tired, and it was obvious that we were not playing our best, but I won, and I think it was important for me back then. It gave me a lot of confidence, and I realized that the top players are not invincible; you can beat them. Until you get that first win, you always feel like they are just in a different world. But once you beat them, you know that it’s possible.
