Comment by benatkin

I disagree. This isn't a contrived category, which is common in tournaments, to make them interesting. On chess.com and Lichess there are chess tournaments that are restricted to people with lower than, say, a 1500 rating. If a 1700 chess player plays worse on purpose to get the score down, that's called sandbagging. There is little room for sandbagging here. People can't just change their ages, or up and move to the US. There are age ratings and regional divisions in different sports, and it both makes things more fair and opens up more opportunity to compete.

This is a significant achievement and the boy is undeniably an elite chess player.

Edit: s/soundbagging/sandbagging/g