Child Prodigy December 27, 2001

Who is this contemporary child prodigy?

In our third puzzle you were asked to identify a true child prodigy, one who started playing chess at a very early age. This player, whom you can see in the following pictures, went on to become a world-class grandmaster. often to be found amongst the top ten in the world.

We got many solutions from readers who identified the infant grabbing the chess pieces in the pictures as Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Judit Polgar, Peter Leko, Vassily Ivanchuk, Michael Adams, Evgeny Bareev, Alexander Morozevich, Peter Svidler, and some others. Wrong! The infant is my son Tommy, who later on in fact went on to play tournament chess, but was never a chess prodigy. But then, who said the prodigy we were looking for was the infant?

The honest-to-goodness chess prodigy, the one who was whipping everyone in town at the age of six, who played in GM tournaments at 12, and who actually went on to become a world-class grandmaster, is the person holding the baby!

The child prodigy is in reality the 16-year-old Nigel Short, who was determined to see whether a 10-month-old child could learn the game he so excelled at.

A lot of people did correctly recognise Nigel in the pictures above. Most Interesting were those who were tricked into trying to identify the baby and still got it right. They noticed that the person holding the child did bear a remarkable resemblance to Nigel Short, but assumed it was his father or mother (!) holding the infant Nigel.

Frederic Friedel