The moves of babes and sucklings

As the February issue of this year’s British Chess Magazine arrived, my attention was swiftly drawn to the astounding news that an eight year old, Leonid Ivanovic from Serbia, had become the youngest player ever (eight years and eleven months) to defeat a grandmaster in classic tournament play (rather than a blitz or rapid format). True, his opponent, Milko Popchev, is not a Grandmaster to rank in the same league as those I watched and admired at Hastings, in my own very early days as a chess addict. These included great champions, such as Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, and just behind them, Gligoric, Keres, Uhlmann…

Nevertheless, Popchev is doubtless a formidable adversary in his own right. Imagine my further surprise when, within hours, I discovered that the infant Leonid’s record had been shattered, just a few weeks later, by an even younger eight year old, Ashwath Kaushik, eight years and six months, of Indian origin, but resident in Singapore.

What can be the explanation for such a sudden explosion of prodigious talent?

World chess champion Vassily Smyslov once published an anthology of his chessboard masterpieces entitled In Search of Harmony, a volume, by the way, in which I figure as one of the great man’s victims. Chess is an area of human endeavour, which, in common with mathematics and music, allows child prodigies to demonstrate astounding genius. And I suggest that “Harmony” is the key.

Consider the young Mozart. Among so many other precocious musical achievements, such as composing the Minuet and Trio in G Major, aged five, he was able to reconstruct and transcribe Allegri’s Miserere from memory, having heard the closely guarded score just once during a visit to the Vatican. It should be recalled that at the age of fourteen, Mozart also wrote his first opera: Mitridate Re di Ponto, or “Mithridates, King of Pontus”.

In mathematics alarming precocity was displayed by, for example, Ruth Lawrence, who graduated from Oxford University aged 13 with a starred first class Honours Degree; not to mention John Nunn, who went up to Oxford at the age of 15 to pursue his mathematical studies. Nunn, who also distinguished himself as a chess-playing prodigy, went on to become a grandmaster and professional player, who numbered even the legendary Anatoly Karpov amongst his scalps.

Indeed, accounts abound of amazingly youthful chess prodigies, including José Raul Capablanca, who allegedly picked up the moves of the game aged four, simply by watching his father play. Then there was Paul Morphy , who at 12 defeated the illustrious European Master Löwenthal, and, perhaps most spectacular of all, Bobby Fischer, US champion at the age of 14 and victor of the so-called Game of the Century , when he was 13.

In spite of the sensational nature of these wins against grandmasters by eight year olds, their achievements do not yet equate to the award of the title itself. This accolade requires consistency over time, not just single victories. At the end of this column I have appended a list of the ten youngest chess grandmasters to date.

It seems to me, as it has to others, that there must be some quality which links chess, music and mathematics. I believe that quality to be an inner harmony which connects all three activities and which the youthful human brain is capable of identifying. The striking factor is that prodigies in chess, music and mathematics are capable of performing at the highest level without significant prior experience.

It would be unthinkable for a child or young teenager to paint like Leonardo da Vinci or write with the depth of Tolstoy or Shakespeare, since the relative life experience would not yet have been accumulated — in general such dimensions would be missing. For music, maths and chess, on the other hand, the prodigies appear to be able to leap the chasm of experience and tap directly into an underlying harmony, a harmony which most of us cannot easily perceive.

Apart from John Nunn, who was proficient in both maths and chess from an early age, it is worth noting that Smyslov (World Chess Champion from 1957-1958) was also an accomplished opera singer. Similarly, the Soviet Grandmaster Mark Taimanov enjoyed a second career as a concert pianist.

With the advent of computers, such as Demis Hassabis’s AlphaZero, new dimensions of harmony are now constantly being revealed. At first sight, or to the uninitiated, the moves and strategies of AlphaZero may appear opaque. Queens moved to fantastically improbable attacking squares , such as h1, at the rearwards furthest extremity of the board, or sacrifices made for no apparent immediate compensation. Yet youthful players, such as Ashwath and Leonid, must have used the computerised resources now available, perhaps fuelled by the popularity of chess engendered by the Netflix Queen’s Gambit series, utilising the spare time and lack of distractions created by the Covid pandemic, to carry out a deep study of computer games and drawn advantageous conclusions for their own strategies. Harmony is there and the babes and sucklings have located it.

Top 10 Youngest Chess Grandmasters

And now, set your palette for precocious:

Ashwath Kaushik vs. Jacek Stopa (18.02.24)

Milko Popchev vs. Leonid Ivanovic (11.01.24)

Ray’s 206th book, “Chess in the Year of the King”, written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, appeared late last year. Now  his 207th, “Napoleon and Goethe: The Touchstone of Genius” (which discusses their relationship with chess) is also available from Amazon and Blackwell’s.

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