Viral

A 10-year-old stopped a chess master mid-handshake. The master had just broken the rules

The boy across from a 2398-rated master did not take the hand. He waited for the arbiter, and the clip is still spreading.

By Jack Morrison10 Oct 2026

Players seated at tables during the last round of a chess tournament

Photo: Mikel Larreategi from Eibar, Basque Country / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Key points

A 10-year-old was rated 369 points below the master he caught
Some say it was cheating, others say even Anand did it
The boy then said anyone can beat Carlsen

A 10-year-old gives check with a knight. The grown man across the board does not move his king. He reaches out to shake hands.

The boy does not take the hand. He points at the board and waits for the arbiter.

That is the clip that spread this week. The boy is Ivan Kukushkin from Bulgaria. The man is Shiyam Thavandiran, an International Master from Canada. Thousands of people watched it and argued about two things. Was it cheating? And why didn't the kid just take the king?

What did the 10-year-old see on the board?

His knight attacked the master's king. That is called a check, and the rules are clear. The player in check must get out of it on the very next move.

In the clip, the master does something else. He ignores the check and offers a handshake. In chess, a move that leaves your own king in check is an illegal move.

Kukushkin did not take the hand. He waited for the arbiter, the official who runs the room and settles rules. He let the official make the call.

The game was round 5 of the Grenke Freestyle Open in Karlsruhe, Germany, in April 2025. Freestyle is a version where the starting pieces are shuffled, so nobody can lean on memorised openings. The record at Chessgames shows Kukushkin won as Black.

A post on X that helped spread the clip said the man was "caught cheating". That is its word, not an official finding.

Who is the grown master he caught?

Thavandiran is no beginner. He won the 2024 Canadian Chess Championship in Toronto. He scored 9 points from 10 games, with 8 wins and 2 draws, and he did not lose a game.

His rating at the Karlsruhe event was 2398. Kukushkin's was 2029. That is a gap of 369 points, which in chess means the master was expected to win most games between the two.

A 10-year-old with a rating above 2000 is rare on its own. Beating a champion is rarer.

Can't the kid just take the king?

This was the top question in the replies, and it is a fair one. The answer is no.

In chess, the king is never captured. The game ends before that, with a checkmate. Think of check as a warning shout. The player in check must fix it. If they can't, it is checkmate and the game is over.

So even if the boy's hand had been faster, grabbing the king would not be a legal move. Instead, the arbiter is called, the move is undone, and the position goes back to how it was.

That is why waiting was the smart play. If the boy had just carried on, he could have made a mess of a game he was winning. Pointing it out and waiting kept it clean.

What happens to a player who makes an illegal move?

Under the standard FIDE rules, the penalty is small the first time and brutal the second time.

Illegal move by the same player	What the arbiter does
First time	Puts the position back and adds 2 minutes to the opponent's clock
Second time	Declares the game lost

Rapid and blitz games have their own rules, so check the event first. These are the standard FIDE rules, and the Karlsruhe tournament rules were not in the clip.

Kids learn this early. Most junior events have arbiters walking the aisles for this exact reason.

In the clip, the boy did not argue. He stayed calm and asked for the official. That is the whole trick in a room full of ticking clocks.

For a 10-year-old, knowing all this is half the battle. Many adults at the club never read the rulebook.

Did the master cheat, or does this happen to the best?

The replies split into two camps.

One camp said it looked like cheating. Their point was that you cannot miss a knight check. Another camp said illegal moves happen to the best players in the world, especially when the clock is low.

The second camp has history on its side. A list of illegal moves by 2700-rated players, kept by chess fans, includes several stars:

Player	Year	Opponent
Viswanathan Anand	2005	Michael Adams
Vassily Ivanchuk	2008	Levon Aronian
Levon Aronian	2009	Dominguez
Vassily Ivanchuk	2010	Teimour Radjabov

The table comes from the list of illegal moves by 2700+ players kept at wismuth.com. It covers 1998 to 2011.

Other commenters named Magnus Carlsen, Vladimir Kramnik and Vidit Gujrathi, and a Topalov and Shirov game. We could not confirm those, so treat them as what people say.

Why did people say the clocks decided it?

Many replies said the boy had about 43 minutes left while the master had about 2. We could not read the clocks ourselves, so that is what commenters say.

If true, it explains a lot. With two minutes left, a player moves in a rush. Tired hands miss checks. Time trouble is when many of these slips happen.

A digital chess clock of the kind that counts down both players' time — A digital chess clock. A player with two minutes left has to move almost instantly.

Either way, the boy had played well enough to hold a huge time lead against a champion.

Why did the comments get ugly?

The clip also brought out nasty replies. Some people attacked the master over his background. Others made racist jokes. We will not repeat any of it.

None of that has anything to do with the board. The rule that was broken is on the board, and the board has no race.

Plenty of replies pushed back. They said the best way to talk about it was the chess, and the chess was the story. For another clip that split the internet in a different way, see the Liam Lawson push-up clip.