The 20-Year-Old Chess Prodigy Laying Waste to the World’s Top Grandmasters
The 20-Year-Old Chess Prodigy Laying Waste to the World’s Top Grandmasters
Javokhir Sindarov is destroying the competition for a spot in the world championship match. Even Magnus Carlsen is stunned.
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American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura was sitting at a chess board in Cyprus last week feeling absolutely stumped. The world’s No. 2 rated player, famous for his talents in speed chess, spent 67 minutes on a single move.
His opponent was a 20-year-old prodigy from Uzbekistan named Javokhir Sindarov. And Nakamura, competing for a shot at the world title, had no idea what to do against the player suddenly rocking the chess world.
After what seemed like an eternity of tortured reflection, Nakamura stumbled right into Sindarov’s trap.
“He just thought one hour and played the wrong move,” Sindarov said. “And after this, I take this advantage and played very well in my opinion.”
The victory left Sindarov in a commanding position at the Candidates tournament, where the winner gets the chance to play for the World Chess Championship. And through seven games, Sindarov’s play has catapulted him into the game’s rarefied atmosphere. With five wins, he has already tied the record for the most ever at the Candidates—and he still has seven games to play before the event ends next week.
But few in the chess community saw this performance coming. Three players in the eight-man tournament came in with higher ratings than Sindarov and, as the most pressure-packed tournament in chess, the Candidates tends to reward experience. Sindarov, however, has been on the fast track to greatness since he was a preteen. The kid from Tashkent who was once the second-youngest grandmaster in history is finally having his star turn.
After Sindarov had breezed through his first five games with four wins and a draw, even Magnus Carlsen was blown away.
“Nobody,” Carlsen said, “expects you to go 4.5 out of 5.”
Nobody, except perhaps Sindarov. Born in the Uzbek capital, he learned with his grandfather as his coach and soon became one of the fastest risers in chess history. Sindarov is one of only five players ever to earn the title of grandmaster before the age of 13.
And even though his home country doesn’t have a long history of producing the world’s pre-eminent chess minds, there has never been a better time to be a competitive chess player from Uzbekistan. Back in 2004, another Tashkent native named Rustam Kasimdzhanov was crowned FIDE world champion, sparking a national wave of interest. The government pushed the game into schools and sponsored new chess clubs. By 2021, the president of Uzbekistan had signed a national decree, “On measures for the further development and popularization of chess and enhancing the system of training chess players.”
In other words, the Uzbeks were coming.
Soon, it became impossible to ignore Uzbekistan’s outsize presence on the international stage. Seven years ago, the country had no one ranked in the top 100 for men’s classical chess. But now a golden generation has risen together. There are now four Uzbeks in the top 50, including world No. 4 Nodirbek Abdusattorov.
Together, Abdusattorov and Sindarov were part of Team Uzbekistan when it won the 2022 Chess Olympiad, the most prestigious international competition. Their coach was none other than Kasimdzhanov, the former world champion.
“They have grandmaster training at an age, where at the corresponding age I didn’t know what a grandmaster was,” Kasimdzhanov said in 2024.
That Sindarov is now in a position to dream of a world title at all is due in large part to the vacuum at the pinnacle of chess since Carlsen’s withdrawal in 2022. The five-time champion from Norway had dominated the classical game for nearly a decade, before electing not to defend his title.
His exit cleared the way for a new generation of super grandmasters, including Ding Liren, the first world champion from China, and Gukesh Dommaraju, the youngest undisputed champion in history.
Now Dommaraju looks set to face one of the most creative players around. At the Candidates, one opponent tried to lead Sindarov away from the common lines that grandmasters tend to study, hoping that he could outwit the 20-year-old in a battle of instinct and intellect, not memorization.
But Wei Yi, the world No. 8, soon found himself scrambling. Through brilliant improvisation, Sindarov pulled out a victory—despite the disadvantage of having the black pieces.
“If I get a chance to play a dynamic position from either side,” Sindarov said, “I will always be very happy.”
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