A friend sent me a link to last week’s NY Times “throwback Thursday” archival post. Many of you already know this famous photo well, but I’d never read the text that accompanied the New York Times coverage 95 years ago:
I find it hard to believe that an eight-year-old could play like this. Nothing spectacular—many adult Class B players who understand bishop vs. knight endings could have played this game—just that the player of the White pieces is “thinking in paragraphs” in a simul. (37…Kd7! = Stockfish)
I’ve heard one grandmaster who knew Reshevsky express doubt about Reshevsky’s true age (his parents may have shaved a year or two off for financial gain), but the child in the picture sure looks like eight going on nine.
A 15-year-old who is one of the top ten players in the world (Fischer) is obviously a prodigy in one sense. But Bobby was not a pre-teen prodigy.
Reshevsky, Morphy, Arturo Pomar (still alive), and Capablanca are often cited as pre-teen prodigies. Does Pomar (a student of Alekhine) even belong on this list? And how strong were Morphy and Capa before age 12? In other words, is Reshevsky unique in chess history? There are so many strong young nine-year-old players today…
Spassky, Carlsen, Judit Polgar, Leko, & Karjakin are all interesting borderline cases…
thanks for the post! obtained reshevsky’s autograph back when i was but a young stripling wanna-be. met him at the us championship in oberlin. '76 i believe it was. still working on the “wanna-be” part…
Even if there are child prodigies, it’s getting to the point where it gets harder and harder to figure out if it’s a true child genius chess prodigy, or just a chess genius with great teaching. This is especially true in today’s world, since there are both great resources (teachers, books, databases, etc), and the sheer size of humanity. Plus in an macro view, there are enough scholastic players in the world that we can find players of every possible playing ability.
Sure you can graph it out and say only a handful of 10 year olds (or even younger), has the potential to be a grandmaster before the age of 16, or at least by the time they’re 16. But statistically, your still going to have a number of players with only slightly less ability, and a bit more that are a little less talented than that.
I’m not saying your not going to have child chess prodigies, but they’ll bubble up in a way that’s harder to identify. A 10 year on the way to chess stardom isn’t going to be doing too many simuls nowadays. Instead they’ll be prepping themselves for their next big tournament, in which other talented children are also trying to take first place. Plus they don’t have to play adults in simuls anyway. I doubt there’s much money in it, unless their parents are actively trying to promote their child genius. Even that would probably end up being a short simul on a morning show like “Today” or “Good Morning America”, or possible a spot on the “Tonight Show”, or other similar venue.
FYI: A child prodigy chess genius has a lot of natural talent and takes less teaching to achieve their success, but a child chess genius has less natural talent, but still as good as a prodigy by having excellent teaching and studying really hard.
Nuanced difference, and that’s why I say it’s hard to spot a true child chess prodigy. At least, from the perspective of normal players and not grandmasters.
Don’t forget the time period we are talking about here. From the late 1890s until WWI documentation in Russia was not the greatest. In the more rural areas a child’s age was not via a birth certificate, but rather via school attendance. As such if a child stayed out of school for a year [illness, work, etc.] they would be actually a year older than their documented age. I know of this due to my Grandmother being originally from Russia, and it being stated that she was out of school for a year by someone from her village. So it is possible that young Sammy may have been older than stated. Certainly he was not a tall person as an adult.
You’re not the first to suggest this. A mutual acquaintance of ours who knew Reshevsky suggested that Sammy may have been born as early as 1909, which (if true) would have made him ten going on eleven at the Paris 1920 exhibition. (His parents may have had some financial incentive.)
On the other hand, the kid in the photo looks awfully young, height aside.
And if the 1909 theory were true, consider the other end of his career. Reshevsky was (roughly) #1 rated in the world in October 1953: remarkable enough for someone who was almost 42; it’d be even more remarkable for someone who was 43 or 44. (But not impossible: Botvinnik, Anand, and Korchnoi played at a similarly high level in their mid-40s.) Reshevsky qualified for the Candidates in 1967; phenomenal for a 56-year-old, even more so for an older player (analogues: Korchnoi, Smyslov, and Lasker).
What is really phenomenal: Reshevsky did not play tournament chess between 1924 and 1931 (roughly age 13 to age 20, peak development years), and still made it to unofficial #1.
