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India’s Gukesh Dommaraju, at 19 the youngest ever world champion, has had a hard time this year. The teenager has struggled at Wijk aan Zee, where he totalled a modest 50%, and then this week in Prague, where he was last after eight of the nine rounds, scoring just 2.5/8, without winning a single game.
With just Friday’s final round to be played, Prague is currently led by Nodirbek Abdusattorov on 5.5/8, as the Uzbekistan No 1 continues his winning streak from the London Classic and Wijk aan Zee.
The best game so far has been this win by the local Czech hero David Navara. The action-packed game includes queen and rook sacrifices and a pawn promotion, so is well worth playing through. The loser was so impressed by Navara’s creativity that he continued the game until he was checkmated.
Prague scores after Thursday’s eighth round were Abdusattorov 5.5, Jorden van Foreest (Netherlands) 5, Navara 4.5, Parham Maghsoodloo (Iran), Vincent Keymer (Germany) and Chithambaram Aravindh (India) 4, Nodirbek Yakubboev (Uzbekistan), Hans Niemann (USA) and David Anton (Spain) 3.5, Gukesh 2.5.
Faustino Oro, 12, Argentina’s “chess Messi”, has been competing at the Aeroflot Open in Moscow this week in search of what could have been his third and final grandmaster norm, and with it, the GM title and a world age record. Sergey Karjakin, Judit Polgar and Bobby Fischer were among the previous youngest ever GMs. Oro’s family moved from Buenos Aires to Spain to help his career, and he is already the youngest ever 2500-rated player.
Aeroflot Moscow is a major global tournament. The elite six-day, nine-round event included 51 grandmasters and 58 international masters, with a prize fund of 18m roubles (approximately £171,000), and was played at the Carlton Hotel in Central Moscow.
The schedule was tight, nine rounds in six days using the time limit of all the moves in 60 minutes plus a 30-second per move increment from move one, which could be an interesting model for English tournaments seeking to minimise costs.
The 2026 version was won on Thursday by the double world title challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi, who totalled an unbeaten 7.5/9 and won by a full point. Fifteen players tied for second on 6.5. The best known of them was Andrey Esipenko, a world title candidate later this month, and they also included Aleksey Grebnev, who defeated Oro. Oro’s two previous GM norms were scored in Madrid and Buenos Aires, and Aeroflot was his last chance to break the world GM age record held since 2021 by Abhimanyu Mishra of the US.
The youngster failed by a hair’s breadth, falling half a point short of the record with a total of 6/9 where 6.5/9 was needed, and scoring a rating performance of 2597 where the GM minimum was 2600.
At one point, Oro was only on 3.5/6, needing three wins, two of them with the unfavourable black pieces. He got to 5.5/8, winning a fine strategic masterpiece in the grinding style of his hero Magnus Carlsen in round eight, but the final hurdle, Grebnev, rated 2621 and a former world under-18 champion who reached round five of the 2025 World Cup, proved too difficult.
The early moves on both sides were cautious, with all 32 pieces remaining on the board until move 24. While Oro drank his favourite apple juice and launched a probe into the white defences, Grebnev responded with a miscalculation at move 32. But Oro failed to take advantage, ended up in a lost position, and resigned at move 44, faced with mate or loss of the queen.
Meanwhile in St Louis, Mishra, who set the existing GM age record five years ago as a 12-year-old, met the reigning US champion and current world No 3, Fabiano Caruana, in the quarter-finals of the American Cup knockout. He lost 0.5-1.5, but had a fleeting and difficult victory chance at move 18 in their second game.
When Mishra became the youngest ever grandmaster, his achievement was criticised on the grounds that all his three norms for the title were achieved in Budapest in what were termed “norm factories”. However, last year Mishra proved his high quality with a virtuoso performance in the Fide Grand Swiss, where he was close to qualifying for this month’s Candidates in Cyprus.
The final upshot is that, with Oro removed from contention, and no younger talents of similar calibre in sight, Mishra’s world age record could now stand unchallenged for many years or even decades.
4014: 1 Rh8+ Kg5 2 Re5+! f5 (if 2…fxe5? 3 Bd8+ Re7 4 Bxe7 mate) 3 Bd8+ Kg6 4 Bxh4 and White wins with his extra rook.
