Boy, 15, becomes youngest British chess grandmaster

[Still Waters]

A 15-year-old chess prodigy has become the youngest British grandmaster.

Shreyas Royal achieved the prestigious title at the British Chess Championships in Hull on Sunday, breaking David Howell’s UK record, at the age of 16, in 2007.

Shreyas achieved his first “norm” at the Bavarian Open in November 2022, the first of three required to earn the title, and scored his second in London last December.

A GM norm in chess is a high-level performance benchmark that a player must achieve over a total of 27 games, which typically would require three separate tournaments, to earn the title of grandmaster.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/05/boy-15-shreyas-royal-becomes-youngest-british-chess-grandmaster

[pellinore]

'In 2018, Shreyas’s family faced a battle to remain in the country, after Singh’s work visa expired and his son faced having to leave the country he had lived in since he was three.

The family would have had to return to India and they were told there could be no exception unless Singh secured a job paying over £120,000. They appealed to the Home Office on the grounds that Shreyas was a national asset who could become England’s first world chess champion, but were declined.

The chancellor Rachel Reeves, a former junior chess champion and then a Labour MP, and Matthew Pennycook, the MP for Greenwich and Woolwich, where Shreyas lived, wrote to two cabinet ministers at the time urging them to let the boy stay.'

Not the best week for them to poke their heads above the parapet, imo.