A little-known 17-year-old from uzbekistan made a clean sweep of magnus carlsen and the world chess elite on Tuesday, setting a world age record. nodirbek abdusattorov won the world fast racing championship in warsaw, claiming the scalp of magnus carlsen and the last two challengers to number 1, fabiano caruana and ian nepomniachtchi along the way. in rapid chess each player has 15 minutes for all moves, plus an increment of 10 seconds per move.
After 21 rounds of three-minute matches on Wednesday and Thursday, France’s Maxime Vachier-Lagrave defeated Poland’s Jan-Krzysztof Duda in a tie-break to win the world blitz title. 18-year-old World No. 2 Alireza Firouzja was third, but Carlsen was well adrift in 12th place. He said: “Some days you just don’t have it. he was nowhere near the level he needed to be today.”
at 17 years and three months abdusattorov becomes the youngest world champion in open competition history, beating ruslan ponomariov at 18 in the fide version of the then disputed classic crown in 2001 and carlsen, also the 18, at the 2009 world blitz. the next youngest were 22: garry kasparov, in his first victory over anatoly karpov in 1985, and daniil dubov and sergey karjakin when they won sprint titles. The women’s world championship has a youngest record holder, as hou yifan won it in 2010 at age 16, after being the beaten runner-up two years earlier.
earlier in the teens of tashkent’s burgeoning career he had won the under-8 world championship, beaten two grandmasters at nine and was featured in this column when he narrowly missed becoming the youngest gm in history at 12.
abdusattorov had his share of good fortune in warsaw, surviving three lost positions, but he also played a very strong field where levon aronian and boris gelfand were among his other victims.
after 13 rounds he was in a four-way tie on 9.5 points with carlsen, caruana and nepomniachtchi, but the rules excluded carlsen and caruana from the play-off due to their inferior tiebreaks. An angry Carlsen denounced the rules as “idiotic. either all players with the same number of points join the tiebreaker or no one does.”
was to balance luck for nepomniachtchi, who in this same event and under the same rules in 2017 was excluded from the play-off, but the Russian was outclassed in the tie-break games. abdusattorov drew easily with black and then won the second game even though he twice missed mate in two near the end.
abdusattorov is the second player from generation z, defined as people born between 1995 and 2010, to rise to the top of chess. firouzja, whose victories in latvia and slovenia last month put him second behind carlsen in the world rankings, was out of form in warsaw in the rapids but finished strongly in the three-minute blitz to take the medal in bronze and narrowly missing out on the vacier-lagrave vs. doubt play-off.
another gen z player rose to fame when 17-year-old bibisara assaubayeva captured the silver medal at the women’s world sprint championship with 8.5/11, half a point behind the “queen of chess Russian Alexandra Kosteniuk. the teenager from kazakhstan did even better in the women’s blitz, reversing the result to take the gold to kosteniuk’s silver.
Uzbekistan has long punched well above its weight in world chess. four of his teenagers did well at last month’s grand swiss in riga, while 16-year-old javokhir sindarov finished eighth in the blitz in warsaw ahead of many of the world’s elite.
Long ago, the former USSR set the standard for young talent with a golden generation that included David Bronstein, Tigran Petrosian, Ewfim Geller, and Mark Taimanov. England in the 1970s followed the Soviet model with Jon Speelman, Nigel Short, Michael Adams, and later Luke McShane, Gawain Jones, and David Howell. India and the US are doing better now with super squads, but Uzbekistan is showing what even a small nation can achieve with the right approach to developing an elite.
fide has announced that the eight-player candidates for 2022 will be presented in madrid in June-July 2022, with the sponsorship of the scheinberg family, who have previously backed open in the isle of man and whose fortune comes from the sale of pokerstars for almost 5,000 million dollars.
So far the qualifiers are nepomniachtchi (2021 title match loser), caruana and firouzja (riga grand swiss), sergey karjakin and jan-krzysztof doubt (world cup), teimour radjabov (fide nominee), with the remaining two will come from the fide grand prix in berlin and belgrade in february-march 2022. the candidates and their winner have become even more significant than usual after carlsen’s announcement that he will only defend his title if the challenger is from the new generation, thus raising the stakes for the two main contenders who could end up playing each other for the supreme crown.
3796: 1 rc1! qxa6 2 kxc4! bxc4 3 qh3! and white makes a second queen. the trap is 1 rd8?? qxa6 2 c8=q qa1+ 3 kg2 qf1 mate.