Bodhana Sivanandan won the gold medal in the World Girls U8 Championship in Sharm El Sheikh earlier this month, making her the first English world youth champion since 1998, when Nicholas Pert won the U18 event and Ruth Sheldon won the Girls U18.
I witnessed Sivanandan’s enormous talent when we played a casual game of speed chess at ChessFest in Trafalgar Square in July. I knew of her accomplishments, which included tying for second place in the UK women’s blitz championship at the age of seven last year. But naively, I chose an offbeat, slightly risky opening. It soon transpired that she knew it at least as well as I did. A few moves later I was, for a brief moment, utterly lost. I won the game in the end, but was left in no doubt about her prospects.
Sivanandan scored an emphatic 11/11, two points clear of her nearest rival. In June this year, she also won both the Girls U8 rapid and blitz tournaments in Batumi Georgia, also with 11 wins in each event. That level of consistency is itself notable, and her games show a remarkable maturity, with a particular proficiency in the endgame. Still, I can’t help thinking of the hackneyed, but not entirely useless, insight that ‘when you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room’. On paper, Sivanandan would have been a strong contender to win the U12 category, or the open U8 championship (girls and boys), either of which would have provided a sterner challenge. When I was eight years old in 1992, there was no U8 championship, so I entered the world U10 championship, and won it. Some time after, I was bemused to learn that ‘wise’ heads had counselled against playing at all, on the grounds that I might be out of my depth.
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