A nine-year-old chess prodigy has made history as the youngest player to ever represent England internationally for any sport.
Bodhana Sivanandan, from Harrow, North West London, will become the newest member of England’s women’s chess team, when she makes her debut at the Chess Olympiad in Budapest in September.
Bodhana began playing chess at just five years old, during the pandemic and says she wants to become a grand master, England’s youngest Olympic gold medallist and to eventually win a world title.
The young player stunned the chess world in 2022 when she won the world youth championship, making her England’s first winner in more than 25 years.
She has said it’s a ‘great honour’ to be selected for the team.
Bodhana Sivanandan playing chess. The nine-year-old started aged five during lockdown and has taken the world by storm
The schoolgirl has now become the youngest person to represent England in any sport internationally and will join a team who are at least 20 years older than her
Some in the chess world have put the explosion in young talent down to the hit TV show The Queen Gambit on Netflix which starred Anya Taylor Joy (pictured)
The nine-year-old is more than a decade younger than her youngest team mate, Lan Yao, 23.
Her other teammates include Katarzyna Toma, Jovanka Houska and Harriet Hunt, who are all in their thirties and forties.
The record-breaking announcement is a symptom of an emerging talent pool which some have credited to the Netflix show, The Queen’s Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy.
Malcolm Pein, one of the England team selectors, told The Times that the show had inspired millions of new players.
And this is not the first historic moment in the little girl’s career.
In 2022 Bodhana won titles in classical, rapid and blitz competitions of the youth world championship.
Last year she was also crowned the best female player at the European blitz championship in Zagreb.
Lawrence Trent, the chess commentator and international master, wrote on X at the time: ‘Bodhana Sivanandan is one of the greatest talents I’ve witnessed in recent memory. The maturity of her play, her sublime touch, it’s truly breathtaking.
And she is in good company as she will join thousands of young players at London’s ChessFest on Sunday.
Last year Bodhana was invited to Downing Street to play chess with Prime Minister as he pledged £1 million to try and increase the number of English grand masters
The festival brings together enthusiasts from across the country, including many grand masters and Bodhana will be joined by other young chess prodigies.
Among the guests there will be Shreyas Royal, who is set to become England’s youngest ever grandmaster at 15, the world’s number one under-nine player, Ethan Pang, from London, and Supratit Banerjee, 10, the world number two in his age group, who recently transferred from Scotland to England.
Bodhana first heard the historic news that she had made it into the team from her father Sivanandan Velayutham who told her while she was watching chess videos on YouTube.
But this is just the latest chapter in an already exciting career for the nine-year old that started with her rescuing a chess board from the rubbish.
Just last year she was invited to Downing Street and was seen playing chess with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, shortly before the government announced it was going to invest £1million to try and increase the number of English grand masters.
Bodhana previously told an Indian broadcaster that she began playing chess after rescuing a board that was going to be donated to charity.
‘I got fascinated with the pieces and I started taking them. I kept asking questions so my dad then taught me [how to play] using YouTube,’ she said.