My nephew beat HOUDINI?!?!

NOTE: I am in no way stretching the truth of this post in any way and if you are not going to take this seriously, you can leave the topic.

   Okay, so I am a married guy with no kids and I have a brother who lives about two hours away who has a son around the age of 11. His son is actually the one who got me into chess when I played him on an old chess set when my brothers family came to visit about two years ago. I am not going to disclose his actual name but for the sake of this post I will call him Adam(my dogs name). Anyway, when I played him, I hardly took the game seriously because I barely knew the rules and hadn't played in years. We ended up playing around 3-5 games all in which he CRUSHED me! Although I was a little surprised I got destroyed by an 8 year old, I just figured he was learning from a teacher at school or a camp counselor. After being made fun of a bit by my wife and brother for being killed by an 8 year old in a brain game I decided to practice before the next time I played him. In fact, I even made a promise to Adam that I would win the next game we played. I would also like to mention that Adam has been diagnosted with a form of Autism(although I do not know all the details) and even though it affects his social behaviour, I am unsure if it affects his intelligence or his ability to calculate.

   In my spare time I started watching chess tutorials on youtube, ordering beginner chess books off amazon, and even joined this site! I have to say I have become quite addicted to chess since then and even played in a local tournament a couple months ago and scored a 1100 USCF performance and also the same weekend where I played Adam for the second time but this time it was at his house. To my surprise, when I played him on my little pocket chess set I had purchased he had beat me with ease again! This time I could appreciate the amazing tactical ability which he seemed to possess since I could understand much more than I did a little over a year ago which was last time I played him before then. When I got back home I decided to mail over a chess book to my brother to give to Adam, which I ordered but I really could not wrap my head around and seemed much too advanced for my level. It was the first volume of the My Great Predessecors by Garry Kasparov. I asked my brother to call me when he recieved the book and to tell me if Adam enjoyed it at all or would even bother trying to read it. Well, about a week later he called me and said Adam was DEVOURING it. He said he would bring it with him in the car and would always read it without a chess board which completely blew my mind!

   Okay, so now thats all the background information I have, now time to get to the real story. Yesterday my wife and I, my brothers family, and a couple of other relatives went to my parents house to celebrate my dads birthday. I brought my laptop over because I wanted see what elo level Adam played at by having him play agaisnt different strength levels of chess engines. For some strange reason Adam refused to play black and also refused to play any other opening move other than 1.e4. First I had Adam play my shredder program at 1500 and he won very convincingly. Then I had him play the program at 1800 which he mated the program in less than 35 moves! After the two games I was completely blown away and decided to see how he played against Houdini 3(not pro) which I bought off chessbase a couple of weeks ago. I set the time for houdini to 5 minutes for the game because I didnt want it to take that long and I also used the standard opening book provided with the program. To my complete astonishment, HE WON!!!!!!! He took quite a while on his moves and also refused to talk to me during the game. I wasn't able to sleep last night and I have been trying to convince my brother how gifted his son is! Is he the next world champion?!?! Has any other human done this? I don't know how strong houdini is considered if it is playing at blitz speed but it has to be higher than 2500 elo right?? Luckily I found the game automaticly saved to a database on chessbase today and I decided to post it right away. PLEASE POST OPINIONS!! Adam played white

I don't know what to say.  If you are truthful than the kid is obviously a potential talent...  ???  Have him play against Houdini with a longer time control, 20-30 minutes or so. 

Wow! 

I don't actually believe you , but man I hope I'm wrong. I don't think there has ever been an autistic savant in chess...

He's going to lose any tournament if he refuses to play black.  Probably by forfeit.

I call BS. I don't believe this for a second.

Think about chess geniuses over time. 50-70 years ago we had chess geniuses with shitty openning theory. From the story, we can deduce that this book is the only chess thing hes read and its a natural talent, but from the game that was posted, we can infer that a ton of openning knowledge has been built for years. Im not saying its impossible for this kid to have gone on the internet and learned this stuff  on his own, but its pretty ridiculous that this story would be taken seriously. It is too well thought out, just like a story would be. It has no characteristics of a person telling a true story, like a journalistic article, but it has a feel like a story book. 

It is fairly obvious that his 'nephew' being autistic is just a vehicle to get people to believe this drivel. Right when a normal person would look at the story and think 'this guy is full of shit,' he drops that his nephew is autistic to lend authenticisty. 

Frankly, the chess.com forums are filled with people wanting to think they are smarter than everyone else because they play chess. This is a common theme in posts. 

Example posts: 'Does chess make people smarter?' 'Are kids that play chess smarter?' These kinds of post reveal an atmosphere within the chess community of wanting to dominate mentally. 

This lends motive to why someone would BS this post. To get 'one over' on the people of chess.com. To be honest, some of the posts here make me roll my eyes and say, "really? thats the stupidest thing I've heard all day."

This post is a fake, and the poster is trying to prey on us by making us think his nephew is a genius. Ignore this fake fable, it reads just like an urban legend.

Wow, this is turning into a Chess.com mystery! 

Congratulations, this is really a talent. :D

I want to hear what MarkaMark's reply is... And some actual proof would be nice.

"Luckily I found the game automaticly saved to a database on chessbase today"...

Sure you did buddy.  How fortuitous.

Well, considering every move but one so far is confirmed either by modern opening theory or houdini 2, I would have to guess that you made houdini play itself, then posted the game saying that Adam played it with some sob story. Just so you know, engines play different than humans, even Carlsen doesn't play every move the engine suggests - some of his moves are better, some worse, but not every one is the first suggestion.

Yep, the story's just too incredible to believe. I mean, who would actually name his dog Adam?

Anyway, the above quoted part of the OP's story doesn't quite seem to fit with his profile name and online USCF history. Maybe he'll have a good explanation for that.

Did your nephew also invent a perpetual motion machine out of spare lawnmower and snowblower parts as a Science fair project?

Btw, many strong GMs have or had autistic tendencies. One of the leading psychological theories regarding Fischer is that he had Asperger's Syndrome (which is highly questionable for many reasons, including that DSM has been rewritten to drop the use of the term diagnostically).

What about the strenght? Was it on 100%? In somehow at 50?

Not to say it's true or not, but people with autism on occasion can do things at incredible rates. There are people who never played an instrument in their life, had something cause brain damage, then they became incredible within months. He COULD be a savant and is capable of playing chess as good as a computer because his mind essentially IS a computer. Ever seen Rain Man and how he calculates HUGE numbers? That isn't just in movies y'know...

He chose more computer moves than Boris Ivanov - I think it's safe to say this is a troll thread.

I was going to say, maybe it's Ivanov reincarnated

Good way to put it and I believe you that this post is screaming fraudulence. It's interesting you pointed out the storybook feel to this story in comparison to a real journalistic article. I'm studying to be a writer and now I'm exploring the journalistic field of writing. It's good you can differentiate between a fake or dramatic story from something credible and authentic. 

Useful intro, I didn't need to read past that :)

The story is plausible. While to the average player beating a chess engine seems completely out of the realm of possibility it isn't.