A 9-year-old girl is paving the way in a male-dominated game: chess. Bodhana Sivanandan is breaking records and breaking barriers — all at the same time! At 8 years old, she competed in the Cambridge International Open, which is a high-level chess tournament put on by the English Chess Federation, where some of the world's highest ranked chess players compete.
She faced a 30-year-old opponent for her first round, Samuel Gaffney. The young chess player went on to win that match in an astounding victory.
At the end of the event, Bodhana had a FIDE rating (also known as International Chess Federation rating) of 2088. The number is generated by a scoring algorithm that ranks the world's top chess players. She held the figure for the highest rating for a player under 9 in the entire world. She was also the only girl to be placed in the top 10, the highest rated 8-year-old girl in the history of chess, and the third highest of any sex all time, according to Chess.com.
"That little girl is 8, and she is the strongest chess player of either sex in the world of her age," Peter Lee, a 79-year-old British chess champion, told Chess.com after Bodhana beat him in a match in 2023. According to her parents, she learned how to play the game at 5 years old by watching YouTube videos.
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Malcolm Pein, the director of international chess at the English Chess Federation and an international master of the game himself, has high hopes for the young girl. "We're sure that Bodhana will become a Grandmaster one day — we're absolutely sure of that, given her current meteoric rise."
