Some good news for a change. At the age of 13 Shreyas Royal has broken the British record for the youngest ever grandmaster performance.
On Sunday he completed a score of seven points from nine games in the €15,000 Bavarian Open at Tegernsee, Germany. He won six games, drew two and lost only to the top seeded player, the four-time champion of Ukraine Anton Korobov.
As Leonard Barden explains in the Financial Times:
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, England was briefly the No2 chess nation behind the former Soviet Union, but the golden generation grew old and there has been no new English player in the world top 100 since Howell and Gawain Jones emerged in the late 1990s. Royal has just shown that he has the potential to change that.
More immediately, he has a serious chance to score two further norms and complete the requirements for GM before his 15th birthday in January 2024. That would place him among the select group of 40 grandmasters who have earned the title at age 14 or younger. A glance at the list shows that many of them are among the current stars of world chess.
Four years ago I blogged about the struggle of Shreyas Royal's family to stay in the UK.
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