An 11-year-old from Harrow has become the youngest woman grandmaster in chess history

Bodhana Sivanandan, an 11-year-old schoolgirl from Harrow in north-west London, has become the youngest player ever to qualify for the title of woman grandmaster, the International Chess Federation, FIDE, confirmed during the Chess Olympiad in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

She earned the last of the three qualifying results she needed, which chess calls norms, while playing all 11 rounds on England’s top board, the seat a team gives its strongest player, and she finished with eight points from her 11 games, the BBC reported.

The previous record belonged to Kateryna Lagno, who became a woman grandmaster in 2002 at the age of 12, according to the Independent. The title is the highest one open only to women, and it is held for life.

Top board

She first played for England at the Olympiad in Budapest two years ago, aged nine, on board four, and in Samarkand the team moved her up to board one, World Chess reported.

One of the players she beat there was Ireland’s Trisha Kanyamarala, who is 14 and the first Irishwoman to hold the woman grandmaster title, according to the Evening Standard.

Her result also brought her a second norm towards the title of international master, which is open to men and women and ranks above woman grandmaster. Players normally need three of those norms and a rating of at least 2400, and she now has two of the three.

“I’m happy to do it, but I want to keep going and keep making history as well, instead of just stopping here,” she told FIDE in an interview on Sunday.

Lockdown

She started playing during the Covid lockdowns, after she found an old chess set in a bag her father had been meaning to throw out, the Independent reported, and she taught herself the rules from videos on YouTube.

“I was fascinated by how the pieces looked, especially the knight and the queen, and I wanted to use them as toys outside of chess,” she said in an earlier interview quoted by the Evening Standard.

Her father, Siva, told the BBC he had no idea where her talent came from, because neither he nor his wife, both engineering graduates, is any good at chess. She played her first tournament at Harrow Chess Club in July 2021.

The last twelve months

Last October, at the European Club Cup in Rhodes, she beat Mariya Muzychuk, a former women’s world champion, World Chess reported.

In July, at the Dole Open in France, she became the youngest girl ever to earn an international master norm, taking a record Judit Polgar had held. A month later she won the British Women’s Championship, the youngest player ever to do so.

She still goes to school full time, and she told FIDE that chess “links to loads of school subjects, so it’s really useful there as well.”