Nicholas Nip Youngest Master in American History at Age 9
NM Nicholas Nip made chess history today by becoming the nations youngest Master in history at the age of 9 years 11 months, shattering GM Hikaru Nakamura’s record of 10 years 3 months. This record is one of the most prestigious accomplishments in American scholastic chess.
Nicholas is the first 9 year old Chess Master in the history of American chess. To give you an idea, Bobby Fischer broke this record many years ago as a 13 year old.
Nicholas managed this remarkable feat in 75 tournaments in a time frame of 3 years and 3 months. Nicholas’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric…a constant rise with very little stalls or setbacks. In Nicholas’s very first tournament he won the 1st grade championship title in the Northern Cal Regional Championships. From that time until now, Nicholas captured several prestigious titles including K-3 national champion (won while in 2nd grade), Calchess State Kindergarten, K-3 and K-6 Championships. Nicholas has a FIDE rating of 2143. In the last 6 months Nicholas has had a positive score against NM’s including wins against many notable Bay Area NM’s.
Despite his young age, Nicholas has managed in his short chess career to be a consistent winner.
Today Nicholas went undefeated in a Mechanics Institute Quad including a dramatic win against 2339 rated NM Ronald Cusi. Nicholas was in a dominating position, which Cusi struggled to hold in time pressure before finally losing on time. This result was enough to lift Nicholas from 2187 to 2207. Of course Nicholas will be taking a short break from chess until the next supplement comes out! Chess fun sometimes has to be sacrificed for the sake of chess history.
Source: CalChess.org – NM Michael Aigner also wrote about Nicholas here.
Is this kid’s name Nicholas Nip or Nicholas Yip?
Actually, it’s Yicholas Nip.
The kid is a little monster…
You can see him dismantle Eric Schiller on chessgames.com…
His name is Nip
You can see his history at
http://uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlTnmtHst.php?13062538
fpawn also had an entry on it a week or so ago. See http://fpawn.blogspot.com/2008/02/nicholas-nip-on-verge-of-breaking-2200.html
I could beat him in an arm wrestling match.
The kid’s name is Nicholas Nip, and he’s both a pint sized bundle of joy and a tactical terror at the chess board. He is 1-0 against me and he has defeated nine different masters in his young life, including FM Ron Cusi (2339).
I put up another story on Nicholas at my own blog.
http://fpawn.blogspot.com/2008/03/nm-nicholas-nip-first-9-year-old-uscf.html
The link was broken. Go to http://fpawn.blogspot.com and the story is right at the top. 🙂
Michael Aigner
Sounds like a pretty smart ankle-biter with a good competitive instinct.
I hope that chess is just one of many experiences he enjoys.
WOW, that kid is good. Congratulations Nicholas!
I looked up his history. He got 80 rating points by playing match recently. Is it fair or legal to do that? It will be more convinced to others if he reachs 2200 by playing open tournaments only.
But anyway congratulations and hope he can go further and become a GM in the near future.
GO NIP!! We have a new american record.
A.Munoz
womancandidatemaster.blogspot.com
Nips record is tainted
All of those who are pointing out that Nip only played 12% of his games as match games after hitting 2000, how precisely is that relevant? By all indications of his non-match tourney play, Nip is a roughly ~2100 player and clearly all it would take would be a few match games (as that’s really what happened) to get his rating up to 2200. Even if those were a small % of his games, I don’t see how that makes it less suspicious.
Also, the timing of the matches just seems a little too convenient doesn’t it? The matches were played at the very end of February when his age was “9 Years, 11 Months” as noted on the USCF site, likely played then so they would be in time to get rated before Nip turned 10 years old. I think it’s pretty clear someone involved wanted him to achieve the master’s rating at 9 years old to make his breaking of the record appear even more impressive.
For those like Monkroussos saying “it’s not unusual for someone to play matches” or whatever, that might be true, but frankly I don’t buy it in this situation. For one, like I said above the timing is just too convenient; when was the last time a 9 year old played matches like that? Plus, given his performance in recent tourneys, to suddenly perform like 400 points higher than he has been in those two matches (once again given the timing), I think you’d have to be pretty naive to believe that’s all on the up and up.
I don’t know if his opponents were paid off or not as I don’t have first hand knowledge of the situation, but based on all the evidence, I just don’t believe this record was “achieved with integrity” as Hikaru says. The simple fact is, Nip’s rating went up from 2137 to 2193 in two days. At that rating level, that’s a ridiculous amount of rating points to gain in two days no matter how you slice it.
In any case, whatever people think about it in the end, Nip did get the record whether deserved or not, but I think his future performances, not this, will likely be the main thing he’ll be looked back upon in 20 years for. After all, his two predecessors, Bhat and Nakamura both moved on after breaking the record and did some other great things in chess, and time will tell if Nip can do the same (and those sorts of things like breaking the record for the IM or GM title or anything of that sort) will be much harder to obtain by underhanded means.
Tainted or not, give the Kid some credit, he can beat 90% of the chess playing population! Hope he comes to Fresno to play against Grandmaster Susan Polgar in October!