Bodhana Sivanandan, eight, who made chess history last Saturday when winning the women’s prize in the European blitz championship at Zagreb, will be back at the board next week. She will compete in the Caplin Masters at Hastings, the chess world’s longest running congress, which is now in its 97th edition and starts on 28 December.
At Zagreb, the year four Harrow primary school pupil totalled a remarkable 8.5/13 in a field of 555 players, including 48 GMs and 50 IMs. Her tournament performance was rated at 2316, the level of a woman grandmaster. She is set to be ranked England’s No 3 woman at blitz when Fide issues its January rating list.
Her result was comparable to Judit Polgar, the all-time No 1 woman, and her 7.5/8 victory on international debut, aged nine, in the unrated section of the 1986 New York Open, although it began badly as Sivanandan arrived too late for round one and lost by default.
Her father, Velayutham, said: “The taxi driver decided to take us to his favourite west entrance of the venue, rather than the actual location of the playing hall on the east side. We reached the hall, but the door was locked, so we had to walk all around the building again to get to the east side. It was a painful experience carrying luggage and running with a child in the cold weather.”
Sivanandan is resilient, and she recovered quickly, winning four of her next five games, then continuing to score well. In the penultimate round, she defeated an IM for the first time when she beat the England women’s coach Lorin D’Costa, although the finish was bizarre.
D’Costa lost on time in a winning position where simply 1…Nf4 followed by Kf2-g1 and Ng2 is decisive. White’s king and bishop are not mating material, so the result after Black flagged would normally be scored a draw. However, in this case a legal checkmate is possible (WK f3, WB e4, BK h1, BP h2 and 1 Kf2 mate) so under the rules the arbiter declared a win for White.
Polgar was 10 when she beat her first IM, the Romanian Dolfi Drimer, at Adelaide 1987, although that was classical chess, and the Hungarian was already beating IMs in informal blitz games at eight.
By drawing with the two-time Romanian champion GM Vladislav Nevednichy in the final round, Sivanandan became the youngest girl to avoid defeat against a grandmaster in a competitive game.
Sivanandan’s overall performance earned her the women’s prize at Zagreb. She was also the top under‑12 and the top finisher of the English contingent, but the tournament rules allowed only one prize per player.
The eight-year-old is already in the record books. She tied for the English women’s open blitz title at seven, the youngest player to win any national adult title, and was second in the UK women’s open blitz at eight. Her clean sweep of 33 games in the 2023 world under-eight girls classical, rapid and blitz championships can never be beaten, and demonstrates her maximalist approach in the tradition of Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, and Polgar. Her memorable encounter with former British champion Peter Lee, 79, attracted thousands of viewers.
What next? An obvious choice after Hastings would be the European women’s rapid and blitz championship at Monte Carlo from 12-14 January, where the field includes the best women players in Europe, led by Switzerland’s former women’s world champion Alexandra Kosteniuk.
Sivanandan’s ambition is to become a grandmaster, and eventually to compete for the women’s world championship currently dominated by Chinese players. That is a long and difficult journey, but she has made a fine start.
The world No 1, Magnus Carlsen, has won first prize, $200,000, in the Champions Tour for the third consecutive year. Carlsen defeated the US champion and world No 2, Fabiano Caruana, in the semi-final and the world No 6, Wesley So, in the final, both by 2-0 in the best of three sets across the board in Toronto.
Next week Carlsen travels to Samarkand, Uzbekistan, to defend the World Rapid and World Blitz titles he won last year. Play is over five days from 26-30 December, and the prize fund is $1m, split $700,000 for the Open events and $300,000 for the Women’s.
The race for the two final places in the eight-player Candidates at Toronto in April is in its decisive stages, amid growing controversy. So seemed likely to qualify by rating after the No 8, Leinier Domínguez, failed in a bid to gain points at the Sunway Sitges Open in Spain.
Alireza Firouzja, 20, used to be Carlsen’s heir apparent but has been out of form in recent months. The French federation arranged three short matches against veteran GMs in Firouzja’s home town Chartres which could give him the rating points needed to overhaul So.
The opponents were handpicked, and Firouzja has met them in the most favourable sequence for him. He has already scored 5-0, so that a win on Friday in his second game against Sergey Fedorchuk, rated more than 200 points below Firouzja, would keep him ahead of So.
Fide has issued a statement saying that they reserve the right not to rate the Firouzja games. However, there is arguably a precedent. In 2022 China was allowed to arrange special matches for Ding Liren so as to reach the qualifying number of games for a place in the Candidates. Unlike Firouzja, Ding was far ahead of his rivals in ranking, but due to illness and travel restrictions had not competed abroad for several months. Ding is now world champion.
Meanwhile, the Chennai Masters, designed to give Dommaraju Gukesh a chance for the Fide Circuit place despite his setback at the London Classic, has worked out favourably for the 17-year-old Indian, whose fifth-round win followed by two final-round draws made him joint first with his countryman Arjun Erigaisi. Gukesh will now take the Fide Circuit place unless Anish Giri can finish in the top three in the World Rapid or to win the World Blitz, so that India is likely to have three Candidates – Vidit Gujrathi, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa and Gukesh – against two – Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura – from the US.
3899: It’s mate in seven by 1 Qg5! g6 (Qxg5? 2 Rxe8 mate) 2 Qh6! gxf5 3 Rg4+! fxg4 4 Bxh7+ Kh8 5 Bg6+ Kg8 6 Qh7+ Kf8 7 Qxf7 mate.
