NEW DELHI: Twelve-year-old Parimarjan Negi provided the Indian chess fans with thrilling news on New Year day. By stunning Israel's Grandmaster and second seed Sergey Erenburg in the fourth round of the Hastings Masters, Negi completed the formalities of becoming the youngest International Master in the game on Saturday.

Negi, on the threshold of this commendable feat since July, has so far collected 30 points from four games to cross the stipulated rating of 2400 needed to claim the title of an IM. The youngster already holds four IM norms, one more than required. He broke the record held by England's David Howell since February 2004.

It was just past Saturday midnight in India when Negi outsmarted Erenburg in 73 moves. Significantly, Negi is rated 130 points below Erenburg's rating of 2582.

After the early exchange of queens, Negi took Erenburg to an ending involving a knight each and pawns. Negi held the initiative due to his extra pawn before the seasoned GM looked like forcing a draw. But in a position where the players had a queen each, but no pawns, Negi delivered a crushing blow by coming up with an accurate king move and forced Erenburg to resign immediately after he had promoted his last pawn to a `queen'.

Negi, with 3.5 points shares the lead with five others. In the fifth round, Negi plays eighth seed Serbia's Milos Pavlovic, a GM with a rating of 2507.

Gurpreet Pal Singh (2) registered his second victory by stopping Peter Poobalasingam of England. However, Gurpreet's trainee and World under-10 boys' champion Sahaj Grover suffered his fourth straight loss by going down to Mark Rich.

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