Faustino Oro is 10 years old and he is a prodigy. He started playing online in the middle of the pandemic and, four years later, he leads the Under 12 world ranking, has 2,351 ELO points – the system used to classify players – and since this Sunday he holds the title of international master, which achieved after signing a draw with the Chilean international maestro Fernando Valenzuela Gómez (2358 ELO) for the ninth round of the Cerrado IM held in Barcelona, Spain.
“I don’t like chatting or notes. I want to play”, he repeated, in October 2022, dressed in a military green sweatshirt and black sneakers. “I enjoy playing. More than talking. I like winning,” he warned when he was preparing to play the Pro Am International Copa Clarín.
Alejandro, his father and also a chess player, told this newspaper that before the coronavirus pandemic, Faustino saw him playing chess and told him “How boring!”. He preferred basketball, which he practiced for a while, and soccer – he is a fan of Vélez and FIFA – which he was about to start playing just when the confinement was declared, which ended up changing his life.
The thing is that after a few months of confinement, in that 2020 marked by the damn Covid, mom Romina suggested that her husband teach her chess, with the hope of distracting him and preventing him from destroying her living room with the ball. Alejandro explained the basic rules, showed him how the pieces moved and opened an account on the Chess.com platform., the most popular in the world, to start playing. Like Fausti, the new sport did not hook him right away.
“This game is very difficult,” he told his father a week later, when he had lost a good part of the 800 points he had started with. “It’s a game to think about,” Alejandro replied. And he proposed a challenge: for every 100 points he earned, they would give him a prize.
“A few days later, he told me: ‘I raised 100 points, I have a prize’. It was a sleepover. And in one week he asked me for a prize three times. It is very difficult to raise points on the platform. Imagine that the best players have 3,200. If you raise 100 points every two days, you would arrive very quickly. That’s why I thought ‘What is he doing?'” Alejandro recalled.
Then he logged in to watch an online game and was surprised when his son made a move that not even he himself, a 30-year-old chess player, would have made in that game. He showed the video to his father, then the best player in the family, who told him: “With a month of chess, that’s not normal.” That’s where Fausti’s story with the boards began.
At first, still in the middle of the pandemic, it was all online. And his father says that the rivals did not believe they were playing against a 7-year-old boy or suspected that he might be receiving help. But before long everyone in the chess environment knew who Fausti was. Because he also wanted to start broadcasting his games live on his YouTube channel (he hasn’t done it anymore for a while) and that made him better known.
Alejandro claimed that he did not know how his son learned to play so well so quickly. He admitted that since he was little he did things that were normal for him and not normal for others.. He put together, for example, the magic cube in two and a half minutes when he was 3 or 4 years old. But he also stated that “Fausti is super normal in most things.” That’s why when she saw that his son had a special talent on the board, he signed him up for the Torre Blanca club and suggested she start taking classes to polish his skills.
It was not easy to find the right teacher. The first one they contacted bored him because, seeing him so small, he made him start from scratch. And Fausti was clear: he didn’t even want to connect to the second class.
But once they found those who managed to interest him – first, Jorge Rosito and Daniel Pérez, then Leandro Perdomo, all prominent Argentine chess masters, in addition to Fabián Fiorito, his coach in Torre – he became more and more hooked. And, perhaps motivated by his natural restlessness, he learned and improved very quickly.
With the end of confinement he was able to start playing in-person games. And although he was no longer a stranger, it was curious to see how his opponents, much older and more experienced, suffered and sweated thinking that they could lose to him.
Just one statistical data is enough to realize how talented Faustino is. In 2022 he became the youngest player in history to reach 2,100 ELO points (he did it when he was 8 years old). To size it up it is worth comparing: the Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, the best chess player today, appeared for the first time in the ranking in April 2001, at 11 years old and with an ELO of 2,064. Today he has 2,830.
And speaking of Carlsen, it is worth remembering what happened last March. Fausti faced the king of the boards at Bullet Bral 2024, an open competition of ultra-fast games played online in which each player has a total of one minute to move their pieces and try to beat their rival.
The Argentine, at that time with an ELO rating of 2330, played with white pieces and beat the Norwegian grandmaster (2830) in 48 moves to round off a historic victory in his incipient adventure on the boards.
“I’m very happy; “A great joy for me because I had never played against him,” Oro told the Spanish press after achieving that victory that he will never forget.
Its growth responds to a strong decision made as a family. Alejandro Oro and Romina Simondi, both accountants with executive positions in top companies in Argentina, realized last year that everything would happen sooner than they had thought. The time for the final talk arrived and they agreed on the tremendous swerve.
He resigned from his management at Laboratorios Bagó after 12 years. She resigned from Tecpetrol one month after turning 21 at the Techint group company. They packed their suitcases and on Tuesday, December 5, 2023, they arrived in Spain. All so that Fausti, the precocious genius of world chess, rubs shoulders with the elite. It was worth the effort.
