At a time when kids of his age practice A for apple and B for ball, three-year-old Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha practices murmuring C for checkmate! When Sarwagya plays chess, he thumps his pieces on the squares and slaps the clock with a particular menace, which shows that he tries to put his opponent in utmost uneasiness.

However, the reality is that this three-year-old prodigy from Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, needs to stand on a chair or sit on three chairs stacked one on top of the other just to reach the other end of the chessboard.

At the age of three years, seven months and 20 days, Sarwagya is now the world’s youngest rated player in chess history. Kushwaha is still in nursery school but holds a rapid rating of 1,572. Recently, he dethroned Kolkata’s Anish Sarkar, who, in November last year, had become the youngest rated player in history at the age of three years, eight months and 19 days.

Having picked up the sport last year when he was two-and-a-half years old, Sarwagya’s everyday routine includes four to five hours of chess, one hour of which is spent at a chess training centre in Sagar, while the rest is spent on playing online games and learning tactics via videos.

“We pushed him into chess last year because we noticed his mind was like a scrubber, which learns things quickly. In a week of being taught chess, he could name all the pieces accurately,” says his father Siddharth.

He added, “Kushwaha loves the sport a lot. If you wake him up in the middle of the night and ask him to play, he will for hours without a break. But what separates him from other kids his age is his patience to sit on the board and not get restless.”

“When his parents first approached me to train him last year, he looked like a very normal kid. But soon, his capability to play the game well started to shine,” says his coach Nitin Chaurasiya.

“You ask him anything, and there’s no hesitation in answering. He can also hold his own on the board against older kids. You can see his guts when he plays,” says Chaurasiya.