Makes you wonder about all the undiscovered talent of years past. These days most people can play for hours a day from a young age and watch videos by GMs too.
Yes, that's a good point. I'd noticed that some kids seemed to be improving much faster these days, with all the free online resources available.
Though I never imagined improvement as fast as Faustino has accomplished.
It's also interesting to me that he seems to have spent much of his time doing two things mainly (just looking at his account activity): playing a lot of blitz, and doing a ton of Puzzles/Puzzle Rush ...
I just learned about Faustino Oro, the young self-taught prodigy. Thought some of you might find his sudden World-Record rise fascinating:
He started playing on chess.com in the summer of 2020, at 6 years old (https://www.chess.com/member/faustinooro). His father introduced him to chess during the pandemic, as a way of keeping him occupied. His father says that Faustino was self-taught, using YouTube as his only source of chess learning.
Faustino spent about a month struggling at the 1000 online blitz range, playing several hours nearly every day. Then his progress began to accelerate, gaining 100 to 200 points per month.
By the end of his first year of playing, he firmly reached 2200+ online blitz. Around this time he started playing OTB and reached a firm 1750 FIDE.
In his second year of playing, he reached 2400+ online blitz. His OTB at this time reached 2000+ FIDE.
In his third year of playing, he's now firmly 2800+ online blitz, and has passed 2300+ FIDE, becoming the youngest FIDE Master ever, at 9 years old ... and still climbing ...