Akshat Chandra

Akshat Chandra
Chandra in 2015
Country	USA
Born	Livingston, New Jersey, United States
Title	International Master
FIDE rating	2515 (December 2016)
Peak rating	2511 (December 2015)

Akshat Chandra (born 1999) is an American chess prodigy, who has recorded one of the fastest rises in chess in the world.^[1][2][3]

Chandra started playing Chess in 2009, when he was about 9 1/2 years of age, during a visit to India.^[2] Subsequently, when his family relocated to India for a few years, Akshat was further drawn into the game.^[4] In January 2010, Chandra received his starting FIDE rating of 1548. In May 2015, within a period of 5 years and 5 months he crossed the 2500 Grandmaster (GM) rating level in realtime rating. This 952 point gain is the fastest rating improvement in the world of this magnitude recorded in such a short time.^[2][3]

In April 2015, at the age of 15, Chandra won the highest Scholastic Chess title in the US - the National K-12 Championship.^[5][6] In July 2015, he became the US Junior Champion (Closed). ^[2][7] This is the first time in US Chess that both the top Scholastic and the Junior titles are held by the same individual in a single year. In April 2013, as a 13-year old, Chandra won the K-9 Super-National championship.^[8][9]

Chandra has been consistently ranked as the number 1 player in the US in his age category since 2013.^[10] He has also been part of the United States Chess Federation (USCF) All America Chess Team for each year, and has qualified to represent the US at the World Youth Championships in all years since 2013.^[11][12] At the age of 14, Chandra won the gold at the North American Youth Championship, U-18 section, in Toronto, Canada.^[13][14]

In addition to classical time-control chess, he is the 2015 National High School Blitz Chess Champion, and is the highest rated Junior Rapid Chess player (U21) in the country.

After learning chess from local part-time coaches, Chandra, at the age of 10, began working with his first professional coach, the Serbian GM Predrag Trajkovic, who worked with him for 4 1/2 years until early 2014. Chandra attributes a lot of his chess knowledge and success to GM Trajkovic's coaching, which followed the typical Soviet style of chess coaching focused on positional understanding.^[2]

Chandra is also an avid writer.^[15] He has documented his journey from a beginner to a Grandmaster level on his blog Quest to GM. He is also the youngest regular writer for the most visited chess media website in the world, Chessbase, and also contributes articles to the USCF official website.^[16]

Besides growing up in the US, Chandra has also lived in India for a few years, and for a few months in Europe in 2012.

As of January 2016, he is a High School Senior.^[17] Chandra was a recipient of the 2016 U.S. Chess Trust Scholar-Chess Player award, sponsored by the U.S. Chess Trust and the National Scholastic Chess Foundation.^[18]

In the 2016 U.S Chess Championship, Chandra placed last with a score of 1.5/11. In the 2016 Saint Louis Autumn Invitational, he achieved his final Grandmaster norm.

References