🇸🇬 Ashwath Kaushik

Round four of the 22nd Burgdorfer Stadthaus Open, a Swiss tournament in the small town of Burgdorf, played on February 18, 2024. Across a chessboard sat GM Jacek Stopa of Poland — thirty-seven years old, experienced, ranked among the strongest players in the world. His opponent was eight years old, born in 2015, wearing a school uniform, and carrying a backpack. By the time the game ended, Ashwath Kaushik of Singapore had done something that had never been done in the history of competitive classical chess: at 8 years and 172 days old, he had defeated a Grandmaster. The record had stood since the game was invented. He broke it before finishing primary school.

Ashwath was born in India and moved to Singapore when he was just over a year old. His parents, recognizing an early fascination with pattern and logic, introduced him to chess at age four. Within months, he was studying seriously. By age six, he had won his first significant tournament — triple gold in the Under-8 category at the 2022 Eastern Asia Youth Championships. Chess, for Ashwath, was not a hobby or an afterthought. It was, from the beginning, a practice — something to be pursued with the same systematic intensity that Olympians bring to their sport. His training schedule during the school year is approximately twenty-four hours per week. On weekends and holidays, it exceeds that.

The road to Burgdorf ran through a year of steadily escalating performances against increasingly strong opposition. His coaches, who recognized early that they were working with an unusual talent, had been preparing him to compete against International Masters and then Grandmasters — players who were old enough to be his parents, who had studied chess for decades, and who were unlikely to offer any courtesies at the board. Ashwath's qualification for the Burgdorf Open placed him in a field with multiple grandmasters. His parents traveled with him to Switzerland. In round four, the pairings matched him with Stopa.

The game itself, analyzed afterward by coaches and commentators, was not a lucky win. Ashwath played accurately throughout, navigated complex middlegame complications with composure that belied his age, and converted a winning endgame without error. Stopa, by all accounts, played at his normal level — the result was simply that Ashwath played better. After the game ended, Ashwath went back to his hotel room, did his homework, and went to sleep. The global reaction the next day — CNN, NPR, the BBC, chess media worldwide — arrived as something of a surprise to him. "I've seen all the news about me beating a grandmaster," he told CNN Sport, "and it feels amazing."

The aftermath of the record confirmed that this was not a single flash of genius but the beginning of a sustained trajectory. At nine years old, Ashwath scored his first International Master norm at an open in Corsica, France — becoming only the third player in chess history to achieve an IM norm before turning ten. The progression from "youngest to beat a GM" to "youngest to earn an IM norm in a decade" happened in less than a year. His stated goal: to become a Super Grandmaster — a player rated 2700 or above, the unofficial designation for the world's absolute elite — by the age of eighteen.

Ashwath trains under a regimen that emphasizes tactical puzzles, database preparation, classical game study, and the development of intuition through sheer volume of games. He speaks about chess with the vocabulary of someone who has been thinking about it seriously for most of his conscious life. When asked how he prepares to play against much older and more experienced opponents, his answer is simple: "I prepare for the chess. Not for the person." Eight years old, in February 2024 in Burgdorf, Switzerland, that preparation was sufficient.