Before becoming a chess outcast for pro-Putin comments, Sergey Karjakin was the OG prodigy who stopped Magnus Carlsen’s bid at becoming youngest Grandmaster

Karjakin is usually remembered these days — if he is remembered at all — for being the challenger to Magnus Carlsen in the 2016 World Chess Championship held in New York City or his comments in support of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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But Karjakin’s story is much more than just being a Putin cheerleader, as his critics call him. In a sport of prodigies, he was one of the fastest rising players in his youth. He held the record for becoming the youngest grandmaster in chess history for 19 years before Abhimanyu Mishra bettered it. In setting the record, Karjakin had outpaced Carlsen and even D Gukesh and R Praggnanandhaa failed to beat it.

Karjakin’s story is much more than just being a Vladimir Putin cheerleader, as his critics call him. (PHOTO: X/Sergey Karjakin)

When Ruslan Ponomariov became the youngest world champion in history, Karjakin — just 12 years of age at the time — was a second to him.

Born in Crimea’s Simferopol to a lower middle-class family and shaped by the chess school in Eastern Ukraine’s Kramatorsk — which has been described as the greatest talent factory of that time — Karjakin was never short of confidence. When he became the youngest grandmaster in history, journalists wanted to know when they could expect him to become world champion. “At 16,” he proclaimed.

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The path to becoming the youngest world champion called for sacrifices, such as uprooting his life from Simferopol and moving to Kramatorsk over 1,000 kilometer away. But it was a decision that Karjakin’s parents made without blinking.

“We had to leave our jobs and move to Kramatorsk. That was a hard decision to make. We sacrificed everything so that he could become world champion. The move to Kramatorsk was necessary to realise his potential,” Karjakin’s father Alexander said in a documentary called Sergey by Alexander Turpin.

FIDE probably doesn’t know that taking back a move is forbidden in chess!
🤡😂🤡 https://t.co/BYlaMXEzDO

— Sergey Karjakin 🇷🇺🇷🇺🇷🇺 (@SergeyKaryakin) March 2, 2026

“There wasn’t a single grandmaster in Crimea at that time. It wasn’t easy to travel either and we received no support from the government. These things slowed down his development,” added mother Tatyana.

Single-minded

At Kramatorsk, Karjakin worked nine-hour days everyday.

“Training him was like having a dragon that eats everything. It comes over, and you have to keep feeding it. It eats everything you feed it, and then demands more,” Alexander Alexikov, his earliest trainer at the Kramatorsk chess school said in the documentary.

Just when it looked like he was on track to fulfill his own prophecy of becoming world champion by 16, the Kramatorsk chess school shut after the head of the institute died.

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“We went back to Simferopol when I was 13 years old. From the age of 13 to 19, I didn’t have any support,” Karjakin said in the documentary.

So when Russia offered him citizenship, his family gladly accepted, uprooting themselves once again in chase of what they felt was the boy’s destiny.

In Karjakin, Russia saw the opportunity to have their own world champion for the first time since Vladimir Kramnik in 2007.

Karjakin did earn his shot at the title match, 10 years later than he had predicted.

Now 36, Karjakin finds himself out of the rankings list and out of contention for another tilt at the world champion’s crown. But being shut out of the narrow confines of the chess board has not dimmed his ambition. He’s just found other avenues.

Three years ago, he contested the election to become the president of the Russian Chess Federation, but lost. He has been awarded the Russian Federation’s medal “For Merit to the Fatherland”. And since 2024, he has been a Senator in the Crimean parliament (which is now run by Russia since it annexed the region).