Eight-year-old chess prodigy Ashwath Kaushik made history Sunday, becoming the youngest person to ever win a match against a grandmaster in an official tournament. Kaushik, who was born to Indian parents in Singapore, defeated grandmaster Jacek Stopa in Switzerland—a shock result that eliminated the 37-year-old Polish grandmaster from the Burgdorfer Stadthaus-Open. The previous record was set just last month when a fellow 8-year-old chess prodigy, Leonid Ivanovic, shockingly defeated a grandmaster that was decades his senior. Ashwath is almost five months younger than Leonid. He finished the tournament in 12th place—a position that’s expected to send his chess rating soaring. Ashwath’s dad said previously that he learned how to play chess when he was four by playing online at ChessKid—an application he used for as many as seven hours a day to play against other children and his grandparents. “He picked it up on his own,” his dad, Kaushik Sriram, told Chess.com. “It’s surreal as there isn’t really any sports tradition in our families.”
