John Burke: America's Newest Super-Prodigy(?)
ChessBase's English language website has a review of the new rating list, and one of the most noteworthy items is that there is an untitled 13-year-old American named John M. Burke whose FIDE rating is a staggering 2601. He is now the youngest player ever to reach that number, younger than Magnus Carlsen, younger than Wei Yi, younger than everyone. For the moment he is untitled, but that obviously won't be the case for very long, unless it's discovered that he has swallowed a set of Intel chips or something like that. During the Sinquefield Cup Garry Kasparov mentioned some of America's top juniors, for whom he took at least a little credit: GMs Kayden Troff, Jeffrey Xiong, Sam Sevian and the almost-GM Akshat Chandra. But where did Burke come from? Just two-three months ago he was "only" 2258, so part of this is due to a generous k-factor. Even so, these gains are enormous. It will be interesting to see if he starts playing in international events and having success there.
Reader Comments (3)
"John Michael started learning by going to a local expert who instilled much of his initial foundations. Then he began taking Internet lessons with a Romanian International Master who further elevated John Michael's level and rating. After meeting U.S. Champion Grandmaster Joel Benjamin at the U.S. World Youth Championships in 2012, John Michael has been under his wing ever since."
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/chess-john-michael-burke-14-rising-quickly#stream/0
I have a 1-0 score against him!!. I hope he can keep beating World records, so I can show off the rest of my life.
It is clearly a bug in the way ratings are computed. He had a 2258 rating, played 4 tournaments in the same period at a higher level (but less than 2500 or any monster performance), scored ~2 points over his expectations in each tournament, which multiplied by a k-factor of 40 gives a gain of >300 points. I don't understand why ratings are not adjusted after each tournament.
Rating anomaly, his USCF rating is 'only' 2450