Three-year-old’s rise as youngest rated chess player now under cloud after complaint filed

The complaint further claims that all the three opponents who lost to the boy were coaches from the academy where he trains. “It appears that the rating was achieved through unfair means, involving clear violations of FIDE’s fair play principles by the coaches or individuals supervising the games,” the complaint states.
FIDE, sticking to its policy of secrecy over such matters, didn’t confirm or deny the complaint.
However, the boy’s father, Siddharth Singh Kushwaha, and his coach, Nitin Chaurasiya, said they were aware of the complaint. Dismissing the allegations, they claimed that the boy was being targeted due to factional politics in Madhya Pradesh’s chess federation, which is being run by an ad hoc committee for the last few years.
“In Sagar, there are two factions in the local chess body. One faction is trying to target the other by trying to prove my son’s record came by unfair means,” Kushwaha told The Indian Express.
The boy hit the national headlines in the last few months by registering wins over older and better-ranked players. He defeated Abhijeet Awasthi (Rating 1,542), Shubham Chourasiya (Rating 1,559), Yogesh Namdev (Rating 1,696) in tournaments hosted at Khandwa, Indore, Chhindwara and Mangaluru.
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But the complaint states that Chourasiya, Namdev and Awasthi are coaches at the same academy where the boy trains in Sagar. Countering this, the boy’s father and coach have called it a coincidence while claiming that they coach at different academies in the city.
“Just because these people are from Sagar and we know them, it cannot prove that there was anything unfair. I know these three people by face, as someone who also runs a chess academy. They are like our competitors,” said
Kushwaha, who runs a chess academy in Sagar called Olympio Chess Club.
The complaint alleges that at one of the tournaments, both the boy and Namdev entered the event after the draw was decided by FIDE’s electronic system. As is the norm, the names of the two late-entrants were inserted manually in the draw and were also paired to play against each other. The boy ended up defeating Namdev.
In the same tournament, the complaint claims, Namdev lost out on time because he went to the washroom for the final minutes of a 10-minute rapid game. The boy’s coach, however, denied that the loss was because of Namdev going to the washroom.
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“It’s not just my son, there were other children, too, who reached late and were manually paired off,” said Kushwaha.