Trampled by Tots: World Champions Who Bit the Dust Against Children

The news that Vishy Anand got his 2816-rated kiester kicked by the tiny but surprisingly powerful foot of a ten-year-old child in a recent Tashkent simul made me wonder: how young was the youngest child ever to defeat a World Champion?

The ensuing research led to some surprising discoveries! Read on....

1988

Garry Kasparov loses to a 9-year-old Romanian girl named Sarmisa Bilcescu, then accuses her of cheating.

1977

An 8-year-old boy named Nikolai Notkin defeats Anatoly Karpov at the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers. Nikolai is so excited that he wets his pants.

1967

Tigran Petrosian is vanquished by a 7-year-old Rigan boy named Mikhail Flodgâets--who then compounds the Armenian's humiliation by dropping his trousers and bending over (an acceptable form of "victory dance" in Latvia, but frowned upon elsewhere in the world).

1957

Six-year-old Helêne Chateaubriand of Marseilles whips Vassily Smyslov's tuckus in 19 moves, then follows the champion from board to board doing a schoolyard taunt.

1931

A drunken Alexander Alekhine leaves his queen en prise to a fat 5-year-old German named Hansel Grüber, who snatches the hanging piece from the board "as if it were a sausage".

1922

Jose Capablanca, fresh from his recent World Championship victory over Lasker, overlooks a knight fork against 4-year-old Simon Plummer of Manchester, and resigns on move 26.

1899

Emmanuel Lasker forgets the en passant rule and is mercilessly crushed by an Austrian 3-year-old (whose name, alas, has been lost to posterity).

1892

A 2-year-old Swedish prodigy named Ulf Krummhorn utilizes the principle of triangulation to outwit Wilhelm Steinitz--who at that moment begins his notorious slide into madness.


But while some of these cases are quite surprising, none can compare with the most shocking defeat of all: that of the French de facto champion François-André Danican Philidor, who in the year 1769 played a simultaneous exhibition in a Paris salon against eight people: seven adults, and a one-year-old baby named Hêloise Antoinette Lumiêre.

"She barely knew how the pieces moved," Philidor wrote in Analyse du jeu des Échecs (2nd edition), "yet at the crucial moment she produced a mating combination of astonishing brilliance. And then, worst of all--worse by far than the loss itself--she returned to loudly sucking at her bottle, as if by this cruel reminder of her infancy to rub my nose in the shame of my defeat."