At just three years old, a young boy from India has become the youngest chess player to earn an official rating from the International Chess Federation.
Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha, born in 2022, beat multiple opponents — far older than him — to earn a 1,572 rating in rapid chess.
To become the youngest rated player, Sarwagya beat 22-year-old Abhijeet Awasthi (rated 1,542), 29-year-old Shubham Chourasiya (rated 1,559), 20-year-old Yogesh Namdev (rated 1,696) and Abhijeet Awasthi (1542) at several different tournaments, some where grandmasters were competing, according to The Indian Express.
The base rating any chess player can have is 1,400; any lower and they are considered unrated. To become a Grand Master, players tend to exceed a 2,500 rating.
The scale estimates a player’s skills based on wins and losses against opponents. Larger rating shifts occur when a player beats opponents ranked higher or loses to opponents ranked lower. Your rapid rating is your skill level in longer games.
To be rated by the International Chess Federation, a player has to score points against at least five rated players at official events.
Sarwagya, from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, is one of a growing number of young Indian players climbing the sport’s ranks, marking a hopeful new era of dominance for the province which has recently produced chess champions.
Those champions include Madhvendra Pratap Sharma, who won two gold medals at the Asian Chess Championship and the Commonwealth Chess Championship in under three weeks.
“These are great signs for MP chess,” Akshat Khamparia, the convenor of Madhya Pradesh Chess Ad-Hoc Committee, who is also an international master, said.
Sarwagya was about two-and-a-half years old when he started playing chess, his dad, Siddharth Singh, told the Express.
“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,” he said.
“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,” the boy’s father continued.
His coach, Nitin Chaurasiya, said Sarwagya shone from the start, but his young age made it tough to train him at first, with lessons often ending in tears, until he began rewarding the boy with candy when he chose the right moves.
“You ask him anything and there’s no hesitation in answering. He can also hold his own on the board against older kids. You can see his guts when he plays,” Chaurasiya added.
Sarwagya plays chess for four to five hours a day, including one hour at a training centre.
Former world champion Magnus Carlsen began playing chess at the age of five.
Gukesh D, who became the youngest world chess champion in history last year at 18, is also among the youngest players ever to become a grandmaster. He was seven when he first took up the sport.
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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