Below are two of the youngest American grandmasters:
Fabiano Caruana: 14 years, 11 months, 20 days (USA / Italy)
Hikaru Nakamura: 15 years and 79 days (USA / Japan)
Can you round out the top 5 youngest American Grandmasters?
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
Fischer and Seirawan?
Bobby Fischer, Gata Kamsky, and you need to add Ray Robson shortly.
Ray Robson!
Why is it important to be the youngest grandmaster? Is there a difference against being the oldest one?
Yes, young grandmasters are by definition weak grandmasters at the point of conquer.
Robert Hess
I can’t find when Sammy Reshevsky became a GM, whether it was as a prodigy or when he came back to chess after college. Also, Morphy beat Lowenthal as a 12-year-old, so he might have been playing at GM strength at as young an age as any other U.S. player.
I would think the correct answers would be:
Caruana, Nakamura, Kamsky, Hess, Fischer. (Though uncertain about the order of the last two). Robson will certainly soon become a member of the top 5.
@”Why is it important to be the youngest…?”
Maybe not important, but the youngest to achieve GM level almost always become the strongest GMs. (In fact, I’d like to see any cases of someone becoming a GM before age 16 not eventually becoming a top 100 player. I would think Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son, of Vietnam, might be in danger of this. He became a GM at age 14 and is now 19 and “only” ranked 232 in the world. Yuriy Kuzubov, of the Ukraine, roughly the same age and receiving his GM at roughly the same time is currently ranked 109. It is not atypical to see these prodigies end up in the top 50 by their early 20s. So while Nguyen still has some time, you wonder if he is hurt by a lack of access to advanced chess training or some other factors. I really would be interested in seeing a list of super-young GMs who never quite made it or dropped out of chess at a young age without returning.