Faustino Oro, the 11-year-old “chess Messi” from Argentina, set new world records for his age when he won the Legends and Prodigies tournament in Madrid at the end of last month with an unbeaten 7.5/9, achieving his first grandmaster (GM) norm (of three needed for the title) with 1.5 points to spare, plus a 2509 grandmaster rating on FIDE’s rating list for this month.
Oro is the first under-12 in chess history to be rated 2500-plus. His next targets would be his second and third grandmaster norms, and with them Abhimanyu Mishra’s world record as the youngest ever grandmaster, within the next few months.
He already has the European Club Cup in Greece later this month, the Chess World Cup in Goa, India, which begins on Oct. 31, and a closed tournament in Argentina lined up.
Mishra had made heavy weather of it in 2021, needing five tournaments in the US and eight in Budapest before he broke Sergey Karjakin’s 2002 record, and this brought significant norm factory criticism.
However, that all changed last month when Mishra, now 16, proved himself the real deal by almost qualifying for next year’s Candidates Tournament at the Grand Swiss in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
Karjakin drew 6-6 with Magnus Carlsen in the 2016 world title match before losing the rapid tie-break, while Gukesh Dommaraju, the second-youngest on the all-time grandmaster list, is the reigning world champion. The portents for Oro’s eventual status in the chess pantheon are bright.
Oro has strong public relations support, and that could please chess media looking for a global role model when Carlsen, who has just become the father of a baby boy, eventually retires.
Oro has a short and easily memorable surname, which counts for something when his actual and potential rivals include Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Ian Nepomniachtchi and the new Russian talent Roman Shogdzhiev.
Oro has a universal style. He can grind in marathon endings, crush opponents positionally, agree to draws in less than 10 moves and score with imaginative attacks. A few chess.com readers said that Madrid was a disguised norm factory, but at the Fujarah Masters in the United Arab Emirates he was already close to a grandmaster norm before fading at the finish.
The European Team Championship in Batumi, Georgia, begins today and runs through Oct. 14.
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