Meet the British chess prodigy who’s simply overwhelmed a grasp at eight

Bodhana Sivanandan is eight years outdated. She likes watching TV programmes about princesses, combing her Barbie doll‘s lengthy, blonde hair, listening to rock music as she does her occasions tables, and enjoying together with her youthful twin sisters, Visakha and Laksha, aged seven.

She additionally performs the violin and the piano, enjoys consuming her mum’s cooking and adores sweets.

And on high of all that, she loves enjoying chess, very a lot — and in exactly three years has turn out to be astonishingly good at it.

In truth, earlier this month, on the European Rapid and Blitz Chess Championship in Zagreb, Croatia — fast video games, in layman’s phrases — she made chess historical past.

Because not solely did she beat her first worldwide grasp — the England girls’s coach, Lorin D’Costa, 39 — she additionally drew with grandmaster Vladislav Nevednichy, 54, the two-time Romanian champion, and was topped greatest feminine participant after scoring 8.5 in 13 rounds and coming 73rd in a discipline of 555 gamers.

All of which has despatched fairly a tremor although the worldwide chess group.

‘She’s unbelievable!’, they cried.

‘She’s a phenomenon,’ declared Dominic Lawson, the president of the English Chess Federation.

Ever since, her father’s cellular has been ringing continuously with interview requests from TV stations and newspapers. And chess gamers in all places have been poring over her strikes.

But in some way, sitting on the couch at her residence in North Harrow, London, earlier this month, in her faculty uniform and scarlet tights and fiddling together with her hair, Bodhana appears refreshingly unaware of the storm raging round her.

Polite, quietly spoken, most likely a bit daunted by the media furore, she is extra targeted proper now on making it to high school in time for the final day of the Christmas time period — ‘It’s Toy Day, all of us take our favorite toy so, clearly, I’m taking Barbie,’ she says. But put her in entrance of a chessboard and she or he’s a strategic powerhouse. A genius.

Patient, assured, unruffled, masterful. Even if she does have to sit down on a automotive booster seat to have the ability to attain throughout the board — her teeny toes are nonetheless left dangling and swinging within the air.

‘I really feel totally different after I play,’ she explains. ‘I really feel calm and grown up and older than eight. Though some individuals are fairly shocked at how younger I’m.’

And much more shocked when she beats them, which she normally does.

(To give an thought of her hit charge, final yr she had a clear sweep of 33 wins within the 2023 world under-eight ladies classical, speedy and blitz championships.)

‘I choose enjoying youngsters, however the adults are extra my stage,’ she says. ‘I really feel actually completely satisfied after I win and I do not get nervous, as a result of I do not take into consideration the opponent,’ she says. ‘I simply play the board.’

Even when Rishi Sunak is on the opposite facet of it. Back in August, the Prime Minister invited her to 10 Downing Street for a gathering to advertise chess and spotlight a brand new £1 million Government funding within the recreation, to assist help our greatest gamers, particularly the youngest. ‘It was actually enjoyable,’ she says. ‘He is aware of the items and the way they transfer.’

Though, maybe properly, the Prime Minister did not pit his wits in opposition to Bodhana. From what she noticed, would she have overwhelmed him? ‘Yes,’ she says quietly and begins fiddling together with her hair once more.

That’s the outstanding factor about Bodhana. She’s so quiet and regular and small that it is laborious to sq. all that together with her success. Which is fairly phenomenal.

In Zagreb, her general event efficiency score of two,316 was at lady grandmaster stage.

Her efficiency has even been likened to the all-time No. 1 lady Judit Polgar’s worldwide debut within the 1986 New York Open, when the Hungarian, then 9, received the unrated part with 7.5/8 — the all-time end result by an under-ten lady.

And the daft factor is, she solely found chess by chance.

It was 2020, she was 5 years outdated, and a good friend of her father, who was heading again to India, gave the household a bag of toys he was clearing out to drop off on the charity store.

In the bag was a magnetic chess set and Bodhana pounced on it. ‘She was all the time very curious and fast to select up on issues,’ says her mom Lakshmy, 35. ‘Always fairly intelligent.’

But it was the items Bodhana fancied, not the board.

‘I significantly liked the knight and the queen. I wished to have them, to take them away and play with them,’ she says. ‘But my father defined that they weren’t toys, however a part of a recreation.’

She wasn’t satisfied, however Sivanandan, 41, performed her a video about chess on YouTube, displaying how the items moved. So she took the set, immersed herself in YouTube movies and chesskid.com (the place youngsters can play and be taught strategies and strikes on-line — she is now an envoy) and taught herself how you can play. ‘It was lockdown, so there wasn’t a lot else to do,’ Sivanandan says.

An IT marketing consultant for a financial institution, he’s no chess savant himself, however he might see that his daughter was choosing it up astonishingly rapidly. So, after just a few months, he approached their native membership — Harrow Chess Club.

‘I reached out to the membership president about Bodhana and he stated: ‘Every mum or dad thinks their child is nice, so I’d higher see her play’,’ he says. So she performed just a few video games and entered a event or two — all on-line. She received some matches and misplaced so much, too, however she made no traditional blunders.

And the president?

‘He stated: ‘Yes, she’s respectable…’ ‘

Bodhana’s extraordinary trajectory has taken place largely underneath the mainstream radar. But she has already damaged just a few information and the household’s modest, rented house is pretty bursting with silverware — together with three gigantic, shiny trophies perched on the sideboard within the very neat sitting room.

She tied for the English girls’s open blitz title, aged seven, and was second within the UK girls’s open blitz, aged eight.

Earlier this yr, her videoed encounter with former British champion Peter Lee, then 79, attracted 1000’s of viewers on chess.com. Naturally, she gave him a thrashing, which he took with splendidly good grace.

For a toddler prodigy, she actually would not appear to be chained to her chessboard — apparently, on common, she spends simply 45 minutes a day doing on-line and tactical puzzles and a few hours per week with a coach.

And, in fact, there are the tournaments. ‘The greatest bit is the journey, I find it irresistible!’ she says. On Thursday, she’s competing nearer to residence — on the International Chess Congress in Hastings, East Sussex, alongside Shreyas Royal, one other London-based little one prodigy, who’s now 14.

All that is still is for me to recommend we play a recreation ourselves. It’s some time since I final performed, and she or he dispatches me in lower than two minutes. Though she is well mannered to a fault about my humiliation.

It have to be odd being eight and having already made such a stamp on the world. Where do you go subsequent — turn out to be a grandmaster?

‘When I develop up I need to attempt to turn out to be prime minister,’ says Bodhana. ‘Because I’ve been inside Number 10 and it’s extremely good and I’d prefer to stay there,’ she says. ‘Oh sure, and I’d like to hold on enjoying chess.’

What a formidable, grounded, pretty little lady.