Chess: Shreyas Royal, 15, on brink of grandmaster title

England’s best teenage chess player, Shreyas Royal, 15, advanced to the brink of a record-breaking grandmaster title at the weekend when the south Londoner took second prize at the Arona GM open in Tenerife, Spain.

Royal, seeded 24th in a 157-player field, scored 7.5/10 and ended half a point behind the surprise Chinese winner Haowen Yue, 16, with another Chinese player third. The English junior lost in round three, and was behind the leaders on 5/7, but then finished strongly with two wins against GMs, one of them the 2640-rated top seed Alan Pichot.

At 15 years six months, Royal aims to break David Howell’s 2007 UK record of becoming a GM at 16. For that, he needs a 2500 overall rating, which he achieved at Tenerife, and three 2600 GM performances in single tournaments. He already has two of those, and missed the third at Tenerife by a whisker.

When he was aged nine in 2018, Royal and his family were expected to leave Britain due to the expiry of his father’s work visa, but the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid decided he should stay, calling him “one of the most gifted chess players in his generation”. Since then, Royal has steadily advanced and is now a candidate for selection for the England team for the 180-nation Olympiad in Budapest in September.

Royal will compete for the British Chess Championship in Hull in July-August, though he may attempt his final norm in an earlier tournament. He is coached by the England over-50 team captain, GM John Emms, and has support from Sir Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, who was himself a chess talent in his youth, as well as from Tata Consultancy Services.

This Saturday, Royal will compete in the ChessKid Youth Championship, a three-minute blitz event for the world’s best under-16s. There his rivals will include GM Abhimanyu Mishra, 15, who at 12 was the youngest ever GM, and the “chess Messi”, Argentina’s Faustino Oro, who has just set a world record as the youngest ever international master at 10 years eight months.

Puzzle 2579

White mates in three moves (by Fritz Giegold, 1959). Just a single line of play with Black’s replies forced, but you’ll do well to find it in under a quarter of an hour. 

Click here for solution