When Ashwath Kaushik sat down at the 10th Marina Viva Porticcio Open in Corsica in June 2025, he was ranked 49th in a 73-player field. He finished ninth, scored six points from nine rounds, and at nine years, ten months and twenty-seven days old became just the third player in history to earn an International Master norm before turning ten. The achievement confirmed what the chess world has been whispering since February 2024: this is not a fleeting sensation. Ashwath Kaushik is the most gifted child chess player alive.
The Night in Switzerland That Changed Everything
The story of Ashwath Kaushik begins, officially, in a conference hotel in Burgdorf, outside Bern, on 18 February 2024. He was eight years, six months and eleven days old. His opponent in the fourth round of the Burgdorfer Stadthaus Open was Jacek Stopa, a 37-year-old Polish grandmaster with a rating of 2,533 and a Polish Chess Championship title to his name. Ashwath’s own FIDE rating stood at 1,857 – nearly 700 points adrift.
The game was a Sicilian Defence, one of the most combative openings in classical chess. Ashwath, playing with the white pieces, built a slight advantage through the opening and middlegame. When Stopa erred, the boy from Singapore pounced, converting an extra pawn and a more active king into a decisive endgame. Stopa resigned after fifty-eight moves. A child had beaten a grandmaster in a classical tournament, and he had done it younger than anyone in history.
“It felt really exciting and amazing, and I felt proud of my game and how I played, especially since I was worse at one point but managed to come back from that,” Ashwath told Chess.com afterwards. The previous record, set just weeks earlier by Serbia’s Leonid Ivanovic at eight years, eleven months and seven days, was already history. Guinness World Records officially verified the feat in March 2024.
GM Anish Giri, one of the world’s top players, captured the mood on social media: “8 is the new 12.” The observation was sharp and, as events have proved, prophetic.
From Chennai to Singapore: The Making of a Prodigy
Ashwath was born in Chennai on 7 August 2015 and moved to Singapore with his family at the age of two. His father, Kaushik Sriram, had no sporting pedigree. “It’s surreal as there isn’t really any sports tradition in our families,” Sriram told Chess.com. “Every day is a new discovery, and we sometimes stumble in search of the right pathway for him.”
The pathway began on a screen. At four years old, Ashwath learned the rules of chess through the ChessKid app and YouTube videos, then started playing with his grandparents. His parents recognised the talent early. “He picked it up on his own, playing with his grandparents,” his father said. They enrolled him at the Chess Academy of Singapore and brought in a succession of high-level coaches: GM Ilja Zaragatski, who has trained him for more than four years, alongside GM Stany G.A. and FM Guttula Balaji.
By six, Ashwath had won triple gold – classical, rapid and blitz – at the Under-8 Eastern Asian Youth Championship. In the same year, he became World Under-8 Rapid Champion. Singapore’s national federation took notice. Kevin Goh Wei Ming, the CEO of the Singapore Chess Federation and a grandmaster himself, offered measured praise: “Dad is super supportive, boy is dedicated, school allows flexibility and of course he has natural talent. Remains to be seen how far he can go as interests can change as the boy gets older. Still, we are hopeful.”
Goh also noted, with a grin, that Ashwath still needed “a booster cushion to reach the other side of the board.”
The Post-Pandemic Generation
Ashwath Kaushik does not exist in isolation. He belongs to a cohort of prodigies who learned chess during the global lockdowns and have produced results that would have seemed absurd a decade ago. Among his contemporaries are Faustino Oro of Argentina, who in 2023 became the first player to score an IM norm before turning ten; Roman Shogdzhiev, the Russian FM who broke that record by more than a month in December 2024; and Ethan Pang, who briefly held the youngest-ever 2,200 classical rating.
These players share a common trait: they were formed by digital tools. Online platforms, puzzle databases, engine analysis and video tutorials compressed the learning curve that once required years of in-person coaching. Ashwath’s father confirmed this, noting that his son “solves long complex puzzles visually” and “finished GM Jacob Aagaard’s entire Grandmaster series recently without using a board.” His photographic memory is, by any standard, exceptional – but it was the infrastructure of modern chess that turned raw ability into tournament results.
The implications extend beyond individual talent. Chess’s governing body, FIDE, has overseen a dramatic youth boom. Tournament fields that once skewed heavily towards middle-aged men now feature players born after 2015 competing at 2,000-plus rating levels. The post-pandemic generation is not merely younger; it is operating with a sophistication that previous prodigies of the same age simply did not possess. The sport’s cultural reach, too, has expanded beyond the board – as Creativity’s UK explored in its analysis of chess’s esports gambit, the game has found entirely new audiences in digital arenas.
Corsica and the IM Norm
The Corsica performance in June 2025 was the moment that transformed Ashwath from record-holder into serious contender. At the Marina Viva Porticcio Open, he defeated three International Masters and one Federation Master, scoring six from nine with a performance rating of 2,444 – comfortably sufficient for his first IM norm.
He was particularly proud of his round-two victory over 2,428-rated IM-elect Hao Wang, a result that announced his intentions to the field. The norm itself was secured in the final round, a dramatic time-scramble win against FM Luitjen Akselsson Apol.
“It feels really good. I was not expecting this,” Ashwath told Chess.com. “My main goal was just to play my best and improve as much as I could.” He credited his time management as a decisive factor – a strikingly mature observation for a child who had not yet turned ten.
GM Kevin Goh offered a fuller assessment: “I knew that he had become stronger in the last two years, but this does not necessarily translate to results as there are many other factors to consider. So yes, I was a little surprised but not entirely as he always had the talent and potential.”
The federation, Goh stressed, deserved no credit for the result. “They have placed him in an international school with flexibility in schooling arrangements, finding private lessons, investing time to bring him around the world for tournaments, and allowing him the time and space to grow at a comfortable pace rather than trying to smash records. That should certainly be emphasized.”
A World Champion in the Making?
Ask Ashwath what he wants to become and the answer is immediate. “A world champion,” he told CNN in February 2024, without hesitation. Then, with the self-awareness of someone far older: “That will be a bit of time. It won’t come quickly.”
His idol is Mikhail Tal, the Latvian-born former world champion celebrated for his ferocious attacking chess. Ashwath wants to reach a rating of 2,700 – the unofficial threshold of super-grandmaster status – “by playing attacking chess.” Given what he has already achieved, it sounds more like a schedule than a dream.
His classical FIDE rating stands at 2,266, placing him seventh among all players born in 2015 or later. He competes regularly at elite events, including the Grenke Chess Festival and the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Championships.
His father remains grounded. “It shows the importance of balance and not to let any sport or pursuit become the sole definition of oneself, but to have other interests and active school life to sometimes counteract the inevitable troughs of sport,” Sriram wrote on Facebook. Outside chess, Ashwath builds Lego, completes jigsaw puzzles, cycles, and visits the Singapore Zoo.
The Broader Picture: What Ashwath Tells Us About Chess
The rise of Ashwath Kaushik is, at one level, a simple story of talent meeting opportunity. But it is also a story about what happens when a game designed for adult cognition is mastered by children. Chess grandmasters have always been formidable thinkers, but the speed at which today’s prodigies reach elite levels raises questions that the sport has not yet fully answered.
Traditional development paths – years of club play, gradual rating climbs, late-career titles – are being disrupted. Ashwath is already receiving coaching from multiple grandmasters, travelling internationally almost monthly, and performing at a level that would have earned a respectable master title for an adult player a generation ago. The infrastructure supporting him – private schooling with flexible arrangements, dedicated coaches, a father who serves as full-time logistics manager – is a model that few families can replicate.
GM Jacob Aagaard, the Scottish-born trainer and author whose entire Grandmaster series Ashwath reportedly completed without a board, summed up the chess world’s astonishment when he tweeted: “In October I was asked if I could take on a promising young kid as a student. I helped the father get in touch with the excellent trainer GM Stany. Now the kid has broken the record for being the youngest ever to beat a GM in a classical game. Very proud of Tricky Stany from India.”
The chess establishment – from FIDE to national federations – will need to reckon with what these children represent. They are not anomalies. They are the future, arriving ahead of schedule.
Ashwath Kaushik, meanwhile, continues to do what he has always done: sit down at the board, think, and play. The world record, the IM norm, the breathless coverage – they are milestones on a journey that, by his own account, is only just beginning. At ten years old, he has already achieved more than most chess players manage in a lifetime. The question is no longer whether he will reach the top. It is how far he will go. Even Magnus Carlsen, whose own stunning comebacks have defined an era, might find the pace of this boy’s ascent hard to ignore.
