2023-12-20 19:20:00
The eight-year-old British girl was declared the best player at the blitz chess championship in Zagreb at the weekend. Bodhana Sivanandan, who started playing chess three years ago, tied with two-time Romanian champion Vladislav Nevednichy at the tournament. In the competition of 555 players, she finished in 73rd place, and experts in the chess world talk about the girl from the suburbs of London as a chess phenomenon, The Guardian wrote on Wednesday.
“She started playing chess by accident. She was curious and interested, so I started taking her to the English Chess Federation and to people in England who play and support chess. They are very friendly and very supportive of her,” her father Sivanandan Velayutham said of the little player. She first put pieces on the chessboard at the age of five during the coronavirus pandemic.
The chairman of the English Chess Federation, Dominic Lawson, told the Times that Sivanandan’s performance was “absolutely exceptional, but not surprising because she is a phenomenon. For an eight-year-old child, this is an extraordinary result that we have not seen before in this country. She has a remarkably mature style of play, strategic and patient.”
At the tournament in Zagreb, the girl in rapid chess received an Elo rating of 2056, which is very good, but she especially impressed other chess players with her performance in blitz chess, which is even more brisk. She could also have won the under-12 player of the tournament award, but the one-trophy-per-player rule applied and Sivanandan chose the women’s award. Her tournament total of 2316 was on par with a women’s grandmaster.
The little chess player has ambitions to become a grandmaster, the youngest English Olympic champion and eventually win the title of world champion. This summer she played a game with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in Downing Street shortly before he announced a £1 million investment in chess to increase the number of English grandmasters.
At the championship in Zagreb, Czech grandmaster David Navara defended his title of European champion in blitz chess. He won from the position of the fourth seed and followed up on the triumphs of 2014 and 2022.
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