When a 2600 GM loses a game to a player 550 points lower on the rating scale, this will cause us to take note. But if the winner is just nine years old, then surprise turns to stunned shock – especially if the win did not come through a fluke blunder by the GM, but was a gritty, square-by-square grind-down in which the youthful master prevailed. Akshat Chandra has carefully annotated the game.

Nodirbek Abdusattorov!

A few weeks ago while surfing some chess results, I stumbled on to a tournament played in Uzbekistan. I went through the results of the first round to see if there were any major upsets, and as I was about to move on, something caught my eye. I noticed that a very high-rated GM (exactly 2600) Andrei Zhigalko lost his first round to a 2057 FIDE rated player. This is of course a huge upset. But what makes it even more incredible is that the 2057 was a nine-year-old!