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Fabiano Caruana appeared in a photograph in this magazine in 2001, when he was eight. It was raining, and he was wearing an oversized slicker and standing on a park bench. He held an umbrella with one hand and, with the other, reached across a chessboard to make a move in a game against his teacher, Bruce Pandolfini, who was the subject of the article that the photograph accompanied. “He was totally unaware of anything but the chess,” Pandolfini said recently. (In the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” which came out the year after Caruana was born, Pandolfini was portrayed by Ben Kingsley.) Caruana became a grand master in 2007, when he was fourteen, and is currently the third-highest-rated chess player in history, a few points behind Garry Kasparov. In March, he will compete in Moscow for the right to challenge the current world champion, Magnus Carlsen, of Norway, who is two years older.
Caruana lived in Brooklyn between the ages of four and twelve, then moved to Madrid, Budapest, and Lugano. He now lives in Florida. On a recent Monday, he was in Jersey City, at the Liberty Science Center, where he played a chess game against twenty players even younger than he is. “It’s not so easy to work as a team,” Caruana said afterward. “We played on a giant board, with giant pieces, and they quarreled over moves.” He was asked whether any of his opponents had made him fear for his world ranking. “Maybe in a few years,” he said, smiling. That evening, he took on a similar number of opponents—individually, this time, though all at once—in a benefit for Chess Works!, a science-center program for children. The event was held at the W Hoboken, a hotel that has better views of Manhattan than Manhattan does, and the participants ranged in age from six to what appeared to be sixtysomething. Among them were a number of accomplished competitors, including Alice Dong, who is a senior at Princeton High School and one of the top-ranked female players in the United States.
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