BUFFALO Barron Trump is a chess Grandmaster
Barron Trump was once photographed with a chess set, but that doesn't make him a Grandmaster.
However, some supporters of the president have given Barron Trump the title of Chess Grandmaster.
In mid-October 2018, dozens of social media accounts began circulating the claim that Barron Trump, President Donald Trump's youngest son, had been awarded the title of Chess Grandmaster.
The tweets also made many other bizarre claims: according to some, Barron Trump had an IQ of 146; others argued that Barron's father, Donald Trump, studied under chess legend Bobby Fischer and was himself one of the most famous chess players of all time. Many of these tweets were also accompanied by accusations that the mainstream media ignored the Trump family's numerous chess-related successes.
The buffalo
While it is true that mainstream news has largely ignored these stories, this circumstance is not due to any bias. They just weren't true.
The claim that Barron Trump received the Chess Grandmaster card stemmed from an October 2017 satirical article published on The Daily Chronicle website:
Everyone knows that Barron Trump is the son of the smartest president ever. Or should we call him First Son?
However, Barron received the prestigious title of Chess Grandmaster this week from the International Board of Chessmasters ...
This shouldn't come as a surprise considering who the father is. Donald Trump is one of the highest rated and most famous American chess players of all time.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Donald Trump studied under the guidance of players such as Bobby Fischer. Eventually, he won hundreds of chess tournaments abroad before retiring at the ripe old age of 40.
Although the Daily Chronicle website claims to have “All About The Facts, Not Feelings” on their page, it acknowledges posting satirical content on its privacy page.
We double checked, however, and found that Barron Trump was not listed among the 1600 chess grandmasters in the World Chess Federation database.
If Barron Trump had been awarded such a title at age 11 he would have been noteworthy not only because he is the son of a president, but also because he would have been the youngest person to achieve this honor. At the time of writing, Sergey Karjakin holds the record for the youngest Chess Grandmaster, having achieved the title in 2003 at the age of 12 years and 7 months.
