Makes you wonder about all the undiscovered talent of years past. These days most people can play for hours a day from a young age and watch videos by GMs too.
Faustino Oro
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llama_l wrote:
Makes you wonder about all the undiscovered talent of years past. These days most people can play for hours a day from a young age and watch videos by GMs too.
Yes, that's a good point. I'd noticed that some kids seemed to be improving much faster these days, with all the free online resources available.
Though I never imagined improvement as fast as Faustino has accomplished.
It's also interesting to me that he seems to have spent much of his time doing two things mainly (just looking at his account activity): playing a lot of blitz, and doing a ton of Puzzles/Puzzle Rush ...
He's an FM, so he was also playing OTB.
The old advice of "blitz is poison" seems to have fallen by the wayside. From what I've seen all very quickly improving kids play a lot... but importantly they play a lot of everything, including OTB classical time controls. As long as you're doing that plus studying, it seems blitz can be useful.
Although also this is a marker of passion / obsession... which will skyrocket your improvement whether it's chess or anything else.
Update:
10 months later, Faustino is now 10 years old.
He has :
- Passed 3000 in blitz on Chess.com, placing him in around the top 50 blitz players in the world.
- Passed 2400 FIDE OTB, becoming the youngest International Master in history.
- Defeated Hikaru once in blitz, and twice in bullet (in all three games, Hikaru was down a piece, and resigned).
- Defeated Magnus in bullet (Magnus was down a piece, and resigned).
I'm very curious to see how much farther Faustino may climb ...
This aged well. He's getting better quicker than magnus was. Ofc time will tell to see what happens for him but his future is looking very bright so far
Also pls upload some more in the HotShot forum!
MaetsNori wrote:
Update:
10 months later, Faustino is now 10 years old.
He has :
- Passed 3000 in blitz on Chess.com, placing him in around the top 50 blitz players in the world.
- Passed 2400 FIDE OTB, becoming the youngest International Master in history.
- Defeated Hikaru once in blitz, and twice in bullet (in all three games, Hikaru was down a piece, and resigned).
- Defeated Magnus in bullet (Magnus was down a piece, and resigned).
I'm very curious to see how much farther Faustino may climb ...
Not so long ago I discovered Hou Yiffan was 2500 at age 12... and 18 years later she's... only 2600.
Good calculation and good openings lets inexperienced kids do really well. For some reason continued improvement is not so easy. I guess as you get older your calculation becomes worse, and learning concepts to make up for that is not easy... although in Hou's case maybe her family made her work on becoming a doctor or something (I have no idea what her education is).
Yeah, I'm sure he'll slow down sooner or later. Everyone must reach a limit eventually. Though for now he still seems to be shooting upward.
I don't know about Yifan - she's a strong player who has always seemed to have other interests besides chess.
But I did see in an article that Faustino's parents describe his daily chess exposure as "an endless amount of hours" ... so I'm guessing, if that level of obsession continues, his fast progress will continue ...
To be young and passionate 
llama_l wrote:
MaetsNori wrote:
Update:
10 months later, Faustino is now 10 years old.
He has :
- Passed 3000 in blitz on Chess.com, placing him in around the top 50 blitz players in the world.
- Passed 2400 FIDE OTB, becoming the youngest International Master in history.
- Defeated Hikaru once in blitz, and twice in bullet (in all three games, Hikaru was down a piece, and resigned).
- Defeated Magnus in bullet (Magnus was down a piece, and resigned).
I'm very curious to see how much farther Faustino may climb ...
Not so long ago I discovered Hou Yiffan was 2500 at age 12... and 18 years later she's... only 2600.
Good calculation and good openings lets inexperienced kids do really well. For some reason continued improvement is not so easy. I guess as you get older your calculation becomes worse, and learning concepts to make up for that is not easy... although in Hou's case maybe her family made her work on becoming a doctor or something (I have no idea what her education is).
I guess age has something to do with it but I started around 12 ish and I'm around 18 ish and reaching peaks galore it's prob not just age but it also depends on the person
A good example could be Gothamchess even though he's like 28 he's beating stronger players like everoyher week in titled Tuesday when he used to just panic and Thow positions
I became interested in chess at age 18. I found a local (casual) club where we played unrated games. Went to my first tournament at age 21 and after my first few OTB tournaments I was stable at a 1300 rating... yes, adults can improve, but not as fast as the teenage version of themselves.
llama_l wrote:
I became interested in chess at age 18. I found a local (casual) club where we played unrated games. Went to my first tournament at age 21 and after my first few OTB tournaments I was stable at a 1300 rating... yes, adults can improve, but not as fast as the teenage version of themselves.
Pretty much yes though that doesn't mean you can get better at all
I just learned about Faustino Oro, the young self-taught prodigy. Thought some of you might find his sudden World-Record rise fascinating:
He started playing on chess.com in the summer of 2020, at 6 years old (https://www.chess.com/member/faustinooro). His father introduced him to chess during the pandemic, as a way of keeping him occupied. His father says that Faustino was self-taught, using YouTube as his only source of chess learning.
Faustino spent about a month struggling at the 1000 online blitz range, playing several hours nearly every day. Then his progress began to accelerate, gaining 100 to 200 points per month.
By the end of his first year of playing, he firmly reached 2200+ online blitz. Around this time he started playing OTB and reached a firm 1750 FIDE.
In his second year of playing, he reached 2400+ online blitz. His OTB at this time reached 2000+ FIDE.
In his third year of playing, he's now firmly 2800+ online blitz, and has passed 2300+ FIDE, becoming the youngest FIDE Master ever, at 9 years old ... and still climbing ...