Where age is a whole new board game

The World Junior Chess Championship has lost its glamour of late as the game became younger with every passing year. In the past, 18 or 19 w...

The World Junior Chess Championship has lost its glamour of late as the game became younger with every passing year. In the past, 18 or 19 was considered the age for a player to turn a Grandmaster and 23 or 24 when he starts challenging the World champion and 25 or 26 when he is ready to wear the crown.

Today, at 12 or 13 you are a Grandmaster, at 17 or 18 you are a challenger and there is even a teenager (Ruslan Ponomariov of Ukraine) who emerged World champion at the age of 18.

For the past masters, the World Junior Chess Championship was a significant event. For instance, Anatoly Karpov marked his arrival on the big stage at Stockholm, 1969, with a triumph in the World junior. It took him four more years before he had emerged as a threat to the chess legend Bobby Fischer.

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Similarly, Garry Kasparov won the event in 1980 and in four years he was ready to take over the mantle from Karpov. Kasparov and Karpov became World champions at the age of 22 and 24 respectively. Interestingly, Viswanathan Anand won the World junior at the age of 18 and needed another eight years to challenge the crown (Kasparov) in 1995. And the Indian was 31 when he won the World championship.

The trend was to change dramatically since Anand became World junior champion in 1987. In fact, he was the last World junior champion to have added the World champion’s crown too to his collection.

Curiously, the junior boys champions since Anand have not been able to barge into the top 10 consistently. Levon Aronian and Vladimir Akopian (both Armenia) and Emil Sutovsky (Israel) made some strides but they were no match for the big names of modern chess. Conversely, the big guns like Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, Michael Adams of England, Ponomariov and Vassily Ivanchuk (both Ukraine), Alexander Morozevich (Russia), Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria), Peter Leko (Hungary) and Alexei Shirov (Spain) never had the World junior title in their bag. Kramnik and Ponomariov, for instance, were too big for the World junior even at the age of 17 and 18 as they had crossed the 2,700-Fide rating barrier and were having a tilt at the senior title by then.

The story is virtually the same in the girls section too. Zhu Chen of China remains the only super champion (to have pocketed the World junior and World senior title) and in a few years from now probably Koneru Humpy would find herself in Chen’s company.

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Despite this the World junior continues to be a prime event in the chess calendar and offers a platform for the emerging players to arrive on the big stage.

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