- Sep 25, 2001
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The Dark Side of Chess: Payoffs, Points and 12-Year-Old Grandmasters (Published 2021)
When is a grandmaster’s title less than grand?
This year (2021), a young boy from New Jersey named Abhimanyu Mishra became the youngest Grandmaster in history at age 12.
But top players are publicly questioning Mishra’s title and criticizing the system that helped him get it.
(He tried 5 tournaments in the US between the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021 to get the final points for the title but failed.
His father brought him to Budapest to play questionable tournaments there to get it done.)
Nigel Short, a grandmaster himself and the FIDE vice president, said that he had attempted to reform that system.
But the fact that so many players had already acquired questionable grandmaster titles made it all but impossible.
“The horse has bolted; you cannot close the stable doors,” he said. “The best thing to do is to abolish the title altogether.”
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