🇨🇱 Jaime "Craime" Bustos

Jaime Bustos, who competes under the handle "Craime", is a Chilean professional fighting-game player. He made his competitive debut in 2024, at the age of twelve, in Street Fighter 6 — Capcom's current entry in the longest continuously competitive series in esports, with a professional scene dating to the 1990s. He competes for Team Falcons, the Saudi Arabian organisation that had won the Esports World Cup Club Championship in each of the two preceding years.

The Esports World Cup is a multi-title annual competition built on a club championship structure, in which organisations accumulate points across separate game tournaments. The 2026 edition's Street Fighter 6 event was staged at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. The depth of the bracket is easiest to see in one number: 269 competitors contested the last-chance qualifier alone, and only five of them advanced into the main event.

Bustos lost a single game across the entire group stage. In the quarter-finals he defeated Saul Leonardo "MenaRD" Mena II — winner of EVO 2026, the largest open tournament in the sport — by five games to three. In the semi-finals he eliminated Eisuke "Yamaguchi" Yamaguchi, winner of EVO Japan 2026. Beating both reigning EVO champions back to back, in a single afternoon, put him in the grand final.

His opponent there was Hibiki, a thirty-year-old Japanese player and the oldest competitor in the top eight, who had come through the last-chance qualifier. Bustos lost the opening game and then won five straight, taking the match 5-2. At the age of 15 years, 2 months and 25 days he became the youngest player ever to win an Esports World Cup championship — a fifteen-year age gap between the two players in the final.

The prize package was substantial: $250,000, qualification for Capcom Cup 13, and 1,000 Club Championship points for Team Falcons. It was the organisation's first tournament win of the 2026 Esports World Cup and moved it to the top of the Club Championship standings at the close of that Saturday, with eight of the remaining twelve tournaments still to be played.

Bustos is not an isolated case in the Chilean fighting-game scene, and that is the more interesting fact about him. Fellow Chilean Derek "Blaz" Blaz had finished second in the Street Fighter 6 event at the previous year's Esports World Cup — also aged fifteen. Two finalists from the same small national scene, at the same age, in consecutive years, is a pipeline rather than a coincidence.

The final was not the only youth story of the event. The third-place match was contested by fifteen-year-old Hinao, who made his competitive debut in 2025 and was promoted to REJECT's main roster in May 2026. Hinao beat Yamaguchi in a best-of-nine using Sagat to take third place and $70,000. Between them, Bustos and Hinao made the 2026 podium the youngest in the event's short history.

Because his Capcom Cup 13 qualification puts him straight back into an elite field, the record will be tested rather than left standing on a single result. That distinction matters for an achievement of this kind: a bracket win at fifteen against a field of adults is a measured, dated, independently organised result — the same standard applied to a competition medal or a world record, and a different thing entirely from a highlight reel.

Esports records are frequently reported without the context that makes them meaningful, so it is worth setting out what the Esports World Cup actually is. It is a multi-title annual competition in which organisations compete both in individual game tournaments and for an aggregate Club Championship, staged over several weeks with published brackets, seeded fields and last-chance qualifiers. The Street Fighter 6 event Bustos won drew 269 competitors to its qualifier alone, of whom five advanced. Every match result, round by round, is public. That is the standard this index requires before an achievement is listed.

The age dimension is specific to the genre. Fighting games are decided by frame-level reactions layered over an enormous library of memorised matchups — knowledge accumulated across thousands of hours against particular opponents and particular characters. That combination normally favours players in their twenties, which is why the 2026 grand final pitted a fifteen-year-old against a thirty-year-old and why the result was treated as a generational marker rather than an upset. Whether it holds is already being tested: the Capcom Cup 13 berth that came with the title puts Bustos straight back in front of the same field.