In 2020, Faustino Oro, just six years old, turned his living room into the Amalfitani stadium every day. In the middle of the pandemic, and with everyone confined, he dreamed of one day scoring for Vélez Sarsfield the goals he plugged in between the couch and the television. Romina, Faustino’s mother, then asked her husband to put an end to the situation: “Alejandro, teach him to play chess. At this rate he is destroying our house with the ball.” His father, an experienced amateur player, taught the boy, who a few days later rebelled for not being able to win any game. “This is a game to think about,” said his father, who opened an account for him on Chess.com and offered him a prize for every 100 ELO points he raised. Faustino devoured the videos of the great teacher Pepe Cuenca and Luis Fernández Siles, Luisón, and soon appeared in the room with a smile and adjusting his glasses. Suddenly, every week he was claiming several prizes. It was something impossible. Like Alpha Zero, an artificial intelligence applied to chess, the six-year-old boy improved exponentially on his own. When Luis, the grandfather and best player in the family, reviewed the games, he understood that they were facing something truly special.

Excited by what he saw, the father contacted International Master Jorge Rosito, best coach for the Argentine Federation in 2016. “My son has been practicing chess for a few weeks, but he plays like a genius,” he told him. Rosito took those words with caution because “everyone thinks they have a new Carlsen at home.” Even so, he decided to train with him and in the second session something unusual happened. “I am capable of giving checkmate, with a bishop and a knight, in less than two minutes,” Faustino challenged Rosito. “I don’t think you can,” the teacher replied. This mate is one of the most complex because it is necessary to know a specific pattern. Oro moved his pieces smugly until in less than two minutes he smiled and adjusted his glasses again.

Like that experience, Rosito has recounted many others, because since that day he has accompanied the young Oro in his progression. “It is a gift of life, I feel like I am inside a movie,” he said in an interview with Diario Sur de Argentina. “It never ceases to surprise me. The boy plays you a complicated variant without fail, the Scheveningen of the Sicilian, or any other, and he doesn’t even know it. Don’t ask me how, but he knows where each piece goes. He flows to her. I’ve been recording our sessions for a while because otherwise no one would believe me. I am sure that this material will be a documentary part of the history of chess. “We would all have liked to see how Fischer trained as a child, right?” he said.

Since that moment, Faustino’s progress has surprised the world by breaking all possible precocity records, and the press has not been slow to dub him the Messi of chess. He has been and is the player with the best sub-8, sub-9, sub-10 and sub-11 ranking on the planet in the more than 15 centuries of documented history of the game and was also the earliest to obtain the Master titles. FIDE Candidate and Master. His greatest feat came last September at the Comodoro Rivadavia tournament, in which he achieved his first standard to be an International Master (with three standards the title is consolidated) by being second to two Grand Masters, two International Masters and two Masters. FIDE.

There, Faustino surpassed the great geniuses of history such as Fischer, Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen in precocity. And the International Chess Federation (FIDE) presented it to the world with a message on the networks: “Incredible performance by nine-year-old Faustino Oro (2325). Carlsen did not reach that ELO score until he was eleven years old. As if that were not enough, a few days ago, at the age of ten, he finished fourth in the U-20 Pan American Championship, in which he had a chance of winning until the last round.

His main goal now is to become the youngest International Master in history. And to do this he has until July 2024, when he will surpass the 10 years, 9 months and 20 days that the American of Indian parents Abhimanyu Mishra had when he achieved it in 2019. A race against the clock in which Alejandro and Romina, the parents of the golden boy, plan to step on the accelerator with a decision that could be crucial: come to live in Spain