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Aaron Mendes Wins Under 13 ChessKid Youth Championship

Aaron Mendes Wins Under 13 ChessKid Youth Championship

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Colin_McGourty
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| 13 | Chess Event Coverage

Canada's youngest ever IM Aaron Mendes has won the 2025 Under 13 ChessKid Youth Championship after defeating FM-elect Megan Paragua 5-3 in the final. Paragua got a late chance to play in the knockout after FM-elect Supratit Banerjee was forced to pull out because of a clash, and she came within a draw of clinching the title. Instead Mendes won on demand to force tiebreaks, and then won both games to pick up the $1,500 top prize.    

Knockout Bracket

The one piece of good news for the contestants in the Under 13 ChessKid Youth Championship was that GM Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, the winner of both the Under 13 and Under 16 categories in 2024, has turned 13 and is no longer eligible for the younger category. The Turkish prodigy had to settle for winning the weekend's Bullet Brawl instead, ahead of the likes of GM Hikaru Nakamura.

There were 12 players in the hunt on Saturday, split, roughly based on time zones, into two groups of 12 players, with the top-two in each group set to qualify for Sunday's knockout. There would, however, be a twist.

Group A: Golish, Chakrabarty Qualify

Reigning Under 12 European Youth Chess Champion FM Wiktor Golis from Poland dominated from the start of Group A, delivering checkmate in 22 moves in round one against the eventual runner-up, FM Reyaansh Chakrabarty from Australia.

Golis won four of his first five games, and a slight mid-tournament wobble did no harm.

Chakrabarty followed that opening loss with a shaky draw against the youngest player in the event, nine-year-old CM Ashwath Kaushik (who beat a grandmaster at the age of eight!), but then he stormed to five wins in a row, including a revenge checkmate against Golis. He could afford to lose the final game and still qualify, and could be forgiven for struggling at the end, since the 11-year-old revealed that it was the first time he was awake never mind playing a chess tournament at 1 a.m.! 

Chakrabarty was still happy to be interviewed, telling FM Mike Klein and GM Ben Finegold, "When I was younger I used to always watch ChessKid videos and it’s nice to finally be interviewed by ChessKid," and was refreshingly humble, saying of his chances, "I thought I was one of the heavy underdogs—I thought I would have no chance at coming first or second, I thought 3-4/10 points would be lucky." 

Still, that doesn't mean he's not ambitious! 

"I'm very likely to break that record," he said of GM Anton Smirnov's record of becoming Australia's youngest GM at the age of 16, adding:

Firstly my goal right now is to become the youngest in the world, as my classical FIDE rating is 2346. I’m kind of aiming to become the youngest in the world. If not, I’ll try to become by 13, or at least by 14. I think I have a very good chance at becoming a grandmaster by a young age. 

I'm kind of aiming to become the youngest in the world.

—Reyaansh Chakrabaty on becoming a grandmaster   

There were also scheduling issues in the second group.

Group B: Banerjee, Mendes Qualify

Both English players, 10-year-old WFM Bodhana Sivanandan and 11-year-old Banerjee, were playing in the final weekend of the British Four Nations Chess League (4NCL). Banerjee made a draw against GM Simon Williams before going on to dominate the ChessKid event and qualify for the knockout with a round to spare. He said afterward:

I played a grandmaster, I had a long game, but I managed to draw and I still felt I had quite a bit of energy for this tournament, so I was quite excited to play.

Top-seed Mendes, who in 2023 beat IM Faustino Oro on the way to winning the ChessKid Youth Speed Chess Championship, also got off to a fine 3.5/4 start, but came under a challenge from Paragua, who after a very slow start beat Banerjee in the first game of a three-game winning streak. 

Going into the final round, things were set up almost perfectly, with Paragua trailing by half a point but playing Mendes.

Mendes had White, however, and seemed to play a perfect solid game where his opponent was forced to take risks and went on to lose. It was curious afterward, then, to learn that Mendes was unaware he only needed a draw!

I was not aware of it, since I was not looking at the standings after round five. I was not worried that I needed only a draw. I should have checked the standings!

Paragua, who recently qualified for the FM title by crossing 2300 on the live ratings during the Grenke Open, looked to have just missed out, but she would get a reprieve! 

Knockout: Mendes Beats Paragua To Win Title In Tiebreaks

Since the start time of the final day couldn't be pushed back—Chakrabarty was already starting at 1 a.m. in Australia—Banerjee was forced to drop out, since his 4NCL game against English FM Martin Taylor was in a tense middlegame. The good news for the kid was that he took over and won in style, picking up another 10 rating points.

The 4NCL's gain was the ChessKid Youth Championship's loss, but Paragua had been on standby and took full advantage. She won two battling games to take a 2-0 lead in the four-game semifinal, and though Golis hit back smoothly to win game three he couldn't win the next game on demand—as the Polish star pushed for a win in the queen endgame he got checkmated instead by the U.S. rising talent.

Mendes, meanwhile, ensured Chakrabarty wouldn't need to play past 2 a.m. by winning their semifinal 2.5-0.5. He got off to the perfect start with a checkmating attack in the first game.

Chakrabarty's best chance came in game two, but at the end he took a draw by repetition in a position where he was still better but lower on time. Mendes clinched the match with a trademark endgame victory—his technique was impressive throughout the tournament.

That meant a Paragua-Mendes Final, and given Mendes had won their mini-match 2-0 in the group stage, the only IM in the tournament looked to be the clear favorite.

That assessment hadn't changed when in the first game he converted a winning dynamic position into a stable two-pawn advantage. Things would soon get out of control, however, with Mendes saying overall of the Final, "I usually like to play with a bit of time extra and then with the chaos I just spent too much time calculating, so I also made a lot of mistakes."

Paragua not just equalized but gained a winning position near the end, before a 100-move draw.

All the kids showed admirable composure during the event, but Mendes revealed afterward that he was fuming at missing the win!

I was really mad at that. I was so mad, I was just trying to do deep breathing! I’m not sure if my video was up, but my face was so angry. I was generally angry, but I just try to breathe in and breathe out and try to calm myself down. 

I was so mad, I was just trying to do deep breathing!

—Aaron Mendes on missing a win in the first game of the final

The recovery didn't happen fast, as Paragua went on to take the lead with a sparkling attack in game two, after Mendes had missed a fleeting chance to get a winning position himself (21.gxh7+! instead of 21.gxf7+?). By the time 28...Rxb2+!! appeared on the board Black was crashing through.

Mendes then hit back with an impressive endgame grind, picking up a pawn and smoothly converting to level the scores at 1.5-1.5.

That then became 2-2 after an insane game where Paragua found a perpetual check to save a difficult position, but then instead of taking the draw decided to play on. It almost paid off, though along the way Mendes himself missed a two-move winning sequence, so that the draw that followed—where Black had five (!) passed pawns—was very much fair for both sides.

The Final was best-of-six, so that when Paragua went on to win game five, giving checkmate on move 62, it meant she was only a draw away from clinching the title. Mendes admitted he was "really scared" going into the must-win game, and when asked if he'd played such games before he commented, "I have for my IM norms, but I usually messed that up and didn’t actually win!"

Paragua avoided the usual mistake in such positions of playing strictly for a draw, and in fact gained a better position with the black pieces, but the natural attack she went for proved to be a mistake. Instead Mendes was able to hit back with a winning attack of his own. 

Aaron wins on demand to force tiebreaks.

The tiebreaks were another two 3+1 games, to be followed, if required, by armageddon. In the first, Mendes exploited a tactical mistake to break through with a mating attack on the black king, so that it was now Paragua who needed to win on demand with the white pieces to prolong the match.

She almost managed, but although Stockfish was giving her position as almost a full-piece advantage it was one of those cases where the evaluation seems to come mainly from an advantage in space. Black was level in material, and a couple of less-than-obvious mistakes allowed Mendes to not only equalize but take over.

So Paragua had almost pulled off a fairy-tale win on a day she wasn't initially supposed to play, but in the end it was Mendes who took the title and the $1,500 top prize. Paragua took $1,000 as runner-up.

That's all for the Under 13 section, but in a month's time, June 7-8, we're going to have the Under 16 section, which is set to feature a mouth-watering lineup including defending champion Erdogmus and the likes of Oro and top female stars IMs Alice Lee and Lu Miaoyi. 

Don't miss it!

How to rewatch?

You can review the broadcast on Chess.com's Twitch and YouTube. The games can also be checked out on our dedicated events page. The live broadcast was hosted by GM Ben Finegold and FM Mike Klein.

The ChessKid Youth Championship is Chess.com's top event for the next generation of the chess elite. The under-13 section took place May 3-4, with two six-player groups where the players competed in a double round-robin. The top two players qualified for the knockout, where the semifinal was best-of-four and the final best-of-six. All games were played with the 3+1 time control and the prize fund was $5,000, with $1,500 for first place.

Previous coverage:

    Colin_McGourty
    Colin McGourty

    Colin McGourty led news at Chess24 from its launch until it merged with Chess.com a decade later. An amateur player, he got into chess writing when he set up the website Chess in Translation after previously studying Slavic languages and literature in St. Andrews, Odesa, Oxford, and Krakow.

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