Here is my unofficial calculation with some help from Chessdom.com and other bloggers. I am not sure if they are all correct. Please feel free to make corrections or add any additional names which I may have left out:
1. Sergey Karjakin 12 years, 7 months, 0 days
2. Parimarjan Negi 13 years, 4 months, 22 days
3. Magnus Carlsen 13 years, 4 months, 27 days
4. Bu Xiangzhi 13 years, 10 months, 13 days
5. Teimour Radjabov 14 years, 0 months, 14 days
6. Ruslan Ponomariov 14 years, 0 months, 17 days
7. Wesley So 14 years, 1 month, 28 days
8. Etienne Bacrot 14 years, 2 months, 0 days
9. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave 14 years, 4 months
10. Péter Lékó 14 years, 4 months, 22 days
11. Hou Yifan 14 years, 6 months, 16 days
12. Anish Giri 14 years, 7 months, 2 days
13. Yuriy Kuzubov 14 years, 7 months, 12 days
14. Dariusz Swiercz 14 years, 7 months, 29 days
15. Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son 14 years, 10 months
16. Ray Robson 14 Years 11 Months 16 days
17. Fabiano Caruana 14 years, 11 months, 20 days
18. Humpy Koneru 15 years, 1 month, 27 days
19. Hikaru Nakamura 15 years, 2 months, 19 days
20. Pentala Harikrishna 15 years, 3 months, 5 days
21. Judit Polgar 15 years, 4 months, 28 days
22. Alejandro Ramirez 15 years, 5 months, 14 days
23. Bobby Fischer 15 years, 6 months, 1 day
24. Gene Simmons of KISS 15 yrs. 6 months and 2 days
Hooray for Ray!
Ray is cooler than cool.
One point worth noting is that everyone younger than Fischer were after the dawn of the computer era. Up until then, probably the youngest were guys like Spassky or Tal who were 17-18.
Is this ‘time to earning GM’ or ‘time until awarded GM’?
If you want to double check your “calculations”, try this:
http://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadd.html
Brother Al
Congratulations, Ray! (A local boy, he lives a few miles from here. I haven’t heard any local news stories about it yet, though. Yikes!)
Agreeing with Anon @ 10:21, Fischer’s 15+ years was another of those “head and shoulders above the rest” achievements for his day. (Example of how things change: Roger Bannister’s 4-minute mile was remarkable in 1954, but is standard today. Today’s record is 17 seconds quicker. But Bannister’s achievement was tremendous, as was Fischer’s.)
I’m looking forward to Ray’s growth.
Enough is enough.
I want to see match FineGold-Robson.
‘Up until then, probably the youngest were guys like Spassky or Tal who were 17-18.’
Why not look for youngest GM under 100kg??
Imagine Susan as USCF President. American chess would rule the planet!
Sorry to barge in, but I doubt Ray the GM can solve too many of Susan’s brain-twisting puzzles?
‘http://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadd.html’
Hi bro,
Could you plaease check’em all out and report back to us?
My take on all of this is: HOW ON EARTH DOES ONE BECOME A GRANDMASTER AT 13?????
I mean, I’m supposed to be a smart person, I was an A student all my life, I have bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in an engineering field, I love chess and study chess, but I AM NOT EVEN A MASTER YET 🙁
Conclusion:
CHESS IS HARD!!!
‘HOW ON EARTH DOES ONE BECOME A GRANDMASTER AT 13?????’
Easy. Today’s chess players are much weaker than before, possibly by 400 elo points. It is much easier to beat weak GMs and weak IMs and become a GM yourself. Untitled players are even weaker than untitled players from 10-20 years ago. This is clear if you just look at the games full of mistakes and non understanding of positions. It has become a haven for chess trainers, who cannot get enough free time to teach all the mistakes.
Each new generation is weaker than the previous one. GMs from last generation are laughing their heads off seeing games of new GMs. Same with two generations behind GMs, laughing twice as hard.
Surely, you need to get lucky with selection of trainer. Look at poor Yildiz and Fierro.
So you’ve probably figured about by now that chess is hard. You’ve also probably figured out by now there are a lot of good chess players out there. Too many in fact.
That makes becoming a world class player a very daunting task. Let’s be honest, it would be great to win the admiration of your peers with your chess prowess wouldn’t it? It would be great for them to look at you and say “hey what do you think about this position?” As far as I’m concerned there are really only two ways to do that.
A. Obtain a rating higher than 2000.
B. Fake it.
Achieving number 1 can take a lifetime of reading books, playing games, studying, analysis, dedication, effort, sacrifice. However, achieving number 2 can be done by the time you finish reading this article. Since one of these two goals is achievable in the next five minutes I suggest we go with that one.
I’m lazy. No, really, I am. I will probably never get to 2000. I can accept that fact. What I cannot accept is people thinking I’m an idiot. So in order to circumvent looking foolish, I have created a ten step program that I am willing to share with you out of the goodness of my heart. Best of luck in your chess faking endeavors.
Ten Ways to Make Yourself Look
Like a Chess Genius
1. “Yeah but that creates a backward pawn on an open file.” This statement is a winner! Make sure you throw this out at least 4 times in a given night, regardless of the situation being discussed.
2. Change your last name to something that’s impossible to spell and speak with any kind of an accent, make one up if you have to. I’m telling you, when you walk around and talk with an accent people automatically bump you a class rating.
3. If someone is showing an endgame puzzle or something, make up a famous game that it’s from. Like several weeks back I was at an out of town tournament and I proudly announced the position they were studying was from Morphy versus Lasker in 1799. Everyone was so amazed by my brilliance they just starred at me in silence.
4. “I played Joel Benjamin in an online simul the other night, he was putting some pressure on me, so I traded into a bishops of opposite color endgame and forced a draw.” Proudly announce this in chess club, but make sure you act like it’s no big deal. Use your accent.
5. Walk by someone playing a game and just kind of snicker. When they look up at you say “oh, sorry, I just spotted a forced win. Look for it, it’s there.”
6. When confronted with a puzzle make sure to put on your best concentration face. Sink your eyebrows. A hand gesture of some sort over your mouth is mandatory. Then all at once say, “Wow! That’s clever. I don’t want to ruin it for everyone else so I’m not going to say anything.” Walk away before someone gets a chance to call you out on it.
7. Convince people you are Garry Kasparov.
8. Reference a ficticious book you helped a Grandmaster author. Sound smarmy. “If you’re having trouble converting endgames check out ‘Endgame for total Morons’ that I co-authored with Bobby Fischer in ’97”
9. Make casual references to your ‘students’ and ‘understudies’. For example, “Yeah a student of mine made a similar mistake in his game the other night that you just made, it cost him the Class B tournament prize.”
10. This is by far the most important rule so pay attention. Never, ever, ever play a game over the board.
That’s it! Master these ten rules and you are well on your way to fake chess mastery!
is there chess website with a list of fake chess coaches?
http://malaysia.maribelajar.com/my/
Malaysian_Chess_Coaches_Directory
Hahahahaha!
Some other sources (e.g. Wikipedia) give a “GM age” of 14 years, 11 months and 10 days for Caruana. Following a comment I made, Peter Doggers from Chessvibes did some research and the “truth” seems to be 14 years, 11 months and 15 days – beating Ray Robson by one day … .
Was Robson’s last norm earned in the normal way – on the basis of performance … or is there some ‘easing of standards’ because it’s a special kind of event.
I take it the fact that it’s in S America is irrelevant.