There were just under three hours until the action started and while the organizers went back and forth adjusting some details,
there was a baby walking around the place
.
He arranged the pieces on one table, then those on another, and then those on another.
He inspected several of the clocks with which each player will manage their time in the game and the sheets on which they will record their movements.
And he walks - almost runs, sometimes - from one corner to the other.
The outsider's eye will surely think that he is an "intruder", but that is not the case.
This room full of boards where the most important chess tournament in Argentina was about to start is his world.
The world of
Faustino Oro
.
"I want to play. And there's still about two and a half hours left..." he told
Clarín
, without staying still, revealing a mixture of anxiety and nervousness and a desire for the time to come to start moving the pieces.
Fausti
, at that time
He was just 9 years old and
was a prodigy
.
He still is.
He started playing
online
in the middle of the pandemic and today
he became the cover boy of the newspapers after beating Magnus Carlsen in a "bullet" game.
"I don't like chatting or notes. I want to play,"
he repeated, dressed in a military green sweatshirt and black sneakers.
Maybe he lent himself to conversation.
"I enjoy playing. More than talking. I like to win," he says.
Faustino started playing during the 2020 confinement. Photo Emmanuel Fernández
-And when you lose, don't you find it fun?
-Equal.
You have to recover and try to win in the next one.
Alejandro
, his father and also a chess player, told Clarín that before the
coronavirus
pandemic , Faustino saw him playing chess and told him
"How boring!"
.
He preferred basketball, which he practiced for a while, and soccer, which he was about to start playing just when the confinement was declared, which ended up changing his life.
After a few months of confinement, mom
Romina
suggested to her husband that he teach her chess,
with the hope of distracting him and preventing him from destroying her living room with the ball
.
Alejandro explained the basic rules, showed him how the pieces moved, and opened an account for him on the
Chess.com
platform , the most popular in the world, so he could start playing.
Like
Fausti,
the new sport did not hook him right away.
"This game is very difficult
," he told his father a week later, when he had lost a good part of the 800 points he had started with.
"It's a game to think about," Alejandro replied.
And he proposed a challenge:
for every 100 points he earned, they would give him a prize
.
Faustino Oro, when he was just 9 years old.
Photo Emmanuel Fernandez
"A few days later, he told me:
'I raised 100 points, I have a prize'
. It was a sleepover. And in one week he asked me for a prize three times. It is very difficult to raise points on the platform. Imagine that the best players have 3,200. If you raise 100 points every two days, you would get there very quickly. That's why I thought
'What is he doing?'
"Alexander recalls.
Then he logged in to watch an
online
game and was surprised when his son made a move that not even he himself, a 30-year-old chess player, would have made in that game.
He showed the video to his father, then the best player in the family, who told him:
"
With a month of chess, that's not normal
."
That's where Fausti
's story
with the boards began.
Unusual growth
At first, still in the middle of the pandemic, it was all
online
.
And his father said that the rivals did not believe they were playing against a 7-year-old boy or suspected that he might be receiving help.
But before long everyone in the chess environment knew who
Fausti
was .
Because he also wanted to start broadcasting his games live on his YouTube channel (he hasn't done it anymore for a while) and that made him better known.
With the end of confinement he was able to start playing in-person games.
And although he was no longer unknown,
it was curious to see how his opponents, much older and more experienced, suffered and sweated thinking that they could lose to him
.
Today is one more.
No one is surprised to see him defeat top players.
A single statistical data is enough to realize what Faustino achieved:
he was the youngest player in history to reach 2,100 ELO points
(today he has 2,330).
Carlsen
, number one in the world although no longer world champion by his own decision, appeared for the first time in the ranking in April 2001, at 11 years old and with 2,064 ELO.
Today he has 2,830.
Indian
Dommaraju Gukesh
, third youngest person to achieve the title of grandmaster;
the Iranian
Alireza Firouzja
, the youngest to reach 2,800 points;
and
Arjun Erigaisi
, also from India and who became a grandmaster at age 14, had between 1,700 and 1,800 ELO at Faustino's age.
Alejandro assured that he does not know how his son learned to play so well so quickly.
He admitted that since he was little he did things that were normal for him and not normal for others.
He put together, for example, the magic cube in two and a half minutes when he was 3 or 4 years old.
But he also stated that "Fausti is super normal in most things."
That's why when he saw that his son had a special talent on the board, he signed him up for the
Torre Blanca
club and suggested that she start taking classes to polish his skills.
It was not easy to find the right teacher.
The first one they contacted bored him because, seeing him so small, he made him start from scratch.
And
Fausti
was clear: he didn't even want to connect to the second class.
But once they found those who managed to interest him - first, Jorge Rosito and
Daniel Pérez
,
Then
Leandro Perdomo
, all prominent Argentine chess masters, as well as
Fabián Fiorito
, his coach in Torre, became more and more hooked.
And, perhaps motivated by his natural restlessness, he learned and improved very quickly.
Chess and football, hand in hand
When he started playing, during quarantine, he spent hours in front of the screen, competing
online
all day.
"I wasn't bored," she said.
So, he played instinctively.
He did not think too much about the moves, because one of his main virtues is understanding where the pieces should go and which of the many possible moves is the best for each situation.
At that time, while he played them,
he recounted the games like a soccer match and shouted the victories like goals
.
That's another sport that he is passionate about.
Faustino Oro is the youngest player in history to reach 2,100 ELO points.
Photo Luciano Godoy/FADA Press
"At school I have soccer on Mondays and it's what I like the most. I also like Language, Arts and Gymnastics, my favorite. And Mathematics. I'm good at Mathematics because of chess," commented Faustino, who is in third grade at the San José de Calasanz de Boedo School.
Football is also his favorite entertainment.
"I like to play at Play. At
FIFA
, with the Argentine National Team or
Vélez
. I am a Vélez fan. I went to the field once, a Vélez-Boca, 0-0, before the pandemic," he remembers.
Today he plays more conscientiously and takes his time to choose which move suits him, like players with years of experience do.
In the 2022
National League
, for example, he beat
Luciano Quenallata
in the sixth round in a game that lasted more than four hours.
"It started at 7 and ended around 11:30. Quenallata didn't want to give up...", says with a mischievous look who is getting a taste for the planned games, although they are not his favorites.
Before he played more intuitively, but today Faustino takes more time to think about each play.
Photo Emmanuel Fernandez
"The fast ones are the ones I like the most," he stated before moving a piece on the board in front of him, as he did throughout the atypical interview.
Sitting at one of the tables in the living room, while listening to his father tell what they had experienced in recent years,
he played imaginary games against himself
.
He first moves a white piece, then a black piece and makes moves.
He puts everything back in his place and starts again, occasionally joining the conversation.
And so he was sharing his story.
He said that he likes to watch other players' games on the Internet;
that when he grows up he wants to be a professional chess player;
that sometimes he gets nervous before playing and that dad Alejandro hasn't been able to defeat him for a while.
"
We played a few days ago for a tournament and I beat him
," he revealed.
At one point during the talk, he advances a white pawn, stops the clock (which may not be ticking, because it is not connected), looks at his father and makes a gesture as if to say: 'Come on, let's play
.
'
It is the signal to cut off the interview and let
Fausti
return to her world.
To the world of boards, rooks, bishops and knights.
To the world of chess that he discovered just a few years ago, but in which he has already achieved exceptional achievements for his age.
And in which he will surely continue to shine for many more years.
A family decision
Alejandro Oro and Romina Simondi knew that this moment would come one day.
A life decision, those that are only made after thinking about them too much, awaited them sooner or later.
Both accountants with executive positions in top companies realized this year that everything would happen sooner than they had thought.
The time for the final talk arrived and they agreed on the tremendous swerve
.
He resigned from his management at Laboratorios Bagó after 12 years.
She resigned from Tecpetrol one month after turning 21 at the Techint group company.
They packed their suitcases and on Tuesday, December 5, 2023, they arrived in Spain.
Of course, this family story is missing a protagonist.
The central actor: Faustino, his 10-year-old son who turned 10 in October.
The thing is that the family made such a life decision so that Fausti, the precocious genius of world chess, could rub shoulders with the elite.
This is how it reads:
the Oros left their comfortable life in Buenos Aires in pursuit of the dream of that short guy who behind his glasses hides a roguish face from a novel
and who has monumental talent in a small package.
The great Argentine masters agree that they have never seen anything like it in their lives.
A star who by scandal is number one in the world at his age, who already has an international master standard and who at 10 years old can cope not only with any position on the board but also has a devastating winning mentality.
“We knew that when Fausti passed 2,300 ELO points, the only way he would have to progress was to play against tougher opponents.
And since in Argentina there are very few grandmasters who compete in the country, there is no other way than to play abroad.
In Spain there are many tournaments and from here the travel distances to other countries are reduced,” Alejandro explained to
Clarín
last December from Spain.
The family ended up in that country with one hand behind and one hand forward, without jobs but with the community passport of father and son.
“We came with our savings and for now we pretend that we are on vacation, although the idea is for me to get a job here, because although I have the chance to work remotely for Argentina, the exchange rate difference would not favor me,” Alejandro detailed. crudely.
The entire family project is based on the future of Fausti, who has just finished fourth grade at the school where he attended a single day to have the afternoon free to study chess.
“We told ourselves that if we don't give Fausti the opportunities, he was born into the wrong family,” the father confesses.
There we had comforts and here we can do without many things.
The only condition is not to break up the family or for one to go on tour with him for five months and the other to stay at home.
The objective is that it can develop.
Being here is the best way to face much tougher rivals to try to reach the chess elite.
And for us it would have been impossible to invest $3,000 for each trip abroad with him being in Argentina.”
Dream fulfilled
The wonder kid, who has all the gestures of a genius on the board when he calculates who knows how many variations per move, dreamed of only one dream: he wanted to face Magnus Carlsen, the king of this era of chess.
Just imagining that happening and the wild-haired Norwegian being streamed around the world against a Fausti kneeling in the chair against him simply gave him chills.
The dream came true this Sunday in "bullet" mode.
Oro and Carlsen faced off in an open competition of ultra-fast games played online in which each player has a total of one minute to move their pieces and try to beat their rival.
The Argentine played with white pieces and beat the Norwegian grandmaster in 48 moves to round off a historic victory in his incipient adventure on the boards.
"I'm very happy;
“A great joy for me because I had never played against him,” Oro told the Spanish press after achieving a victory that he will never forget.