For ‘Messi of Chess’ Faustino Oro, youngest GM landmark a mere checklist item on his way to bigger things

The record is currently held by Indian-origin American GM Abhimanyu Mishra, who was 12 years, 4 months, and 25 days old when he became a grandmaster in 2021, thus lowering Sergey Karjakin’s record — which the Russian had held for 19 years — by more than two months.

Oro’s final shot at making history as the youngest grandmaster in the sport will play out at Moscow’s Carlton Hotel, where he will have to win the Aeroflot Open tournament, getting past a thicket of grandmasters like Ian Nepomniachtchi, Andrey Esipenko, Daniil Dubov, Alexander Grischuk and Raunak Sadhwani, among others. In fact, the field at the Aeroflot Open will be stacked against him: 14 players in contention are rated over 2600 with 34 players seeded higher than Oro. The tournament format itself will be unrelenting: players will play two classical games in three of the six days of the event. This is Oro’s last chance at usurping Mishra’s record, which holds an allure for chess players that is second only to being the world champion.

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But for Oro, who has been prophesied for great things by men like Carlsen, becoming a grandmaster is just one of the things he has to cross on the way to bigger things.

“There’s no pressure about the record,” Oro had told The Indian Express in an interview a few hours after he had turned 12 and was only one norm into the pursuit. “I try to play my best chess and enjoy chess. For me, it’s a sport. I am not focussing on the record of being the youngest grandmaster in history. I will try to do that, obviously. But I am more focused on playing my style of chess and trying to improve a bit more every day. And well, if I improve a bit more each day, the grandmaster title will appear.”

Faustino Oro competes at the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Championship 2023. (PHOTO: Lennart Ootes via FIDE)

For a boy who is constantly hurtling past milestones at breakneck pace, Oro likes to take his time on the chess board. He likes to build his attacks slowly, like a menacing serpent coiling before unleashing his offensive.

“I don’t try to checkmate my opponent in 20 moves. I try to play positional chess. I’m a positional player, but with tactics. I like tactics. I’m not trying to win fast. I try to play good chess and focus on winning the game,” said Oro, who delights in putting his opponent under immense pressure on the board before eyeballing them across the 64 squares with such withering intensity that Kasparov would be proud of him.

Such is Oro’s feel for the game that Carlsen is already one of the early believers in the Argentine’s future.

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“He’s a great player. He has a wonderful positional feeling for chess which is quite rare among such young players,” Carlsen recently said in an interview with the Take Take Take app while Oro sat next to him. “He seems to really love chess, seeing as he plays a ton online and he plays every tournament that he can play.”

Oro knows this well. He was once the youngest International Master (IM) in the sport. But that record was short-lived. In a sport that gets younger and younger by the week, no record can hope to rest in peace.

“I do think that there are more important things right now than records,” Carlsen had added. “(If I was in his place) I would focus on just trying to keep it light, not think about results a whole lot. He’s on an incredible path. Believe me, it’s fun to be that much into something and be that good at it at such an early age. So just enjoy it and the pieces will fall where they may.”

Oro may or may not be the world’s youngest grandmaster on March 5 when the Aeroflot Open ends. But he’s already making a case to be the sport’s chosen one.