E-Paper
Who is Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha? 3-year-old MP boy becomes youngest rated chess player in history
Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha began playing chess at the age of two and a half.
A three-year-old boy from Madhya Pradesh, India, has made history by becoming the youngest chess player to earn an official FIDE rating. Born in 2022, Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha was rated 1572 in rapid chess by the global governing body for chess.
Cheese player Rakesh Kulkarni earlier shared a post congratulating the kid. “Congratulations to Sarvagya Singh Kushwaha 🇮🇳 for becoming the World's Youngest Fide Rapid Rated Player! Sarvagya was born in 2022. He creates history by becoming a FIDE-rated player at ‘3 years, 7 months and 20 days’. Incredible!” he added. He concluded his post with a series of pictures of the boy.
Kushwaha’s first rating of 1572 is above the minimum rating of 1,400, reported the New York Times’ The Athletic. He has won five out of the eight rated matches he played against chess players of various ages.
Some of the players he defeated in the rapid games are 22-year-old Abhijeet Awasthi (1542), 29-year-old Shubham Chourasiya (1559), and 20-year-old Yogesh Namdev (1696), as reported by chess.com.
When did he start playing chess?
Kushwaha started playing the game when he was two-and-a-half years old, according to the Indian Express. He spends four to five hours daily playing chess and also one hour at a coaching centre. Additionally, he watches videos of the game to learn new techniques.
“We pushed him into chess last year because we noticed his mind was a sponge and he would pick up things very quickly. In a week of being taught chess he could name all the pieces accurately,” the toddler’s father Siddharth told Indian Express in an interview.
“He loves the sport a lot. If you wake him up in the middle of the night and ask him to play, he will for hours without a break. But what separates him from other kids his age is his patience to sit on the board and not get restless,” he added.
