Teenager Vincent Keymer has risen to become the youngest German chess grandmaster. At the age of 14 years, eleven months and four days, the student from the Rhineland-Palatinate Saulheim took the coveted title at the weekend on the British Isle of Man, which ends in the evening. Keymer fulfilled the required third standard of the World Federation Fide by a draw against the Russian Grandmaster Vadim Svyaginzev. Read more about the chess prodigy here.
"It's great to have reached the third grandmaster standard, and I am very happy about it," Keymer told chess.com.
In the video: Vincent Keymer - the German Century Talent
Georgios Souleidis / DPA
There are currently 1519 active chess grandmasters worldwide - that's just 0.4 percent of the nearly 400,000 registered players in the Fide database. Russia leads this list with more than 200 grandmasters, 91 come from Germany.
Luis Engel becomes grandmaster at the age of 17
At the beginning of October, Luis Engel, at the age of 17, became the youngest German grandmaster. At the 1st Christoph Engelbert memorial tournament in Hamburg, he won his third standard with the shared tournament victory.
This was Angel Keymer, who had been credited with earlier. Recently Keymer had a little losing streak. After he sensationally won the Grenke Open in Karlsruhe in April 2018 as No. 99 of the seedling with a world-class performance, and a few months later fulfilled the second standard at a tournament in Denmark, it took more than a year to win the title.
Experts told Keymer, who began chess playing as a five-year-old, that he had a bright future ahead of him. As a child, Keymer, who was already able to beat world-class players with Israel's Richard Rapport and Boris Gelfand of Israel, regularly played against a chess computer. At some point he was able to defeat the device in each level. His parents registered him in a chess club. At a rapid pace, his playing strength continued to develop:
- At the age of ten, Keymer already had two German Youth Champion titles in his pocket.
- As an eleven-year-old, he won the U18 European Championship title with the youth national team.
- A year later, Keymer narrowly missed the world champion title in his age group.
Keymer has been trained for some time by former world-class Hungarian player Peter Leko, 2004 World Cup challenger. Leko was very talented even as a young player. "If you spend almost all time available with chess, as I do, then it's important to do it the right way and with the right perspective," said Keymer.
