When Bodhana Sivanandan plays chess she has to sit on a booster seat. At nine, she is about to become the youngest person ever to represent England internationally in any sport, but remains unfazed at the prospect.
When she found out last week that she was joining the women’s team at the Chess Olympiad in Budapest, Hungary, in September, she said she was “happy — it’s an honour and I hope to win”. She is clear about her long-term ambition, though, to claim the highest title in the game: “I want to become the youngest grandmaster in the world.”
Bodhana, who lives in Harrow in northwest London, seems to be on track for that. In March she became the world No 1 girl under the age of ten. Malcolm Pein, the manager of the England team, has described her as one of the most remarkable prodigies British Chess has ever seen, and the chess master and broadcaster Leonard Barden described her as “exceptional”.
Her parents are mystified as to where this talent stems from. Her father, Sivanandan, who studied engineering and works in IT, and her mother, Lakshmy Priya, know the basics of chess, but no one in the family has ever played competitively. Her twin sisters, Laksha and Visakha, seven, are uninterested in the game.
“It wasn’t us telling her to play — it was all her own interest, she was just drawn to it,” said Lakshmy, 35. “And we have never forced her to train, it all came to her naturally. Now we’re very surprised but very excited for her [to represent England]; she has worked hard for it.
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“We are very proud but we want to keep her grounded so we don’t talk so much about what she has achieved; we focus on what she wants to become. And as long as she’s happy, we will support her in her ambitions to become a grandmaster and then world champion. It’s all in her hands.”
Bodhana was five when she first came across a chess set after a family friend who was moving back to India gave away some possessions. “In one of these bags was a chess board,” she said. “I was interested in the pieces and wanted to use them as toys.” Her father told her it was a game so she began to learn how to play after they taught her the basic rules of how each piece moves.
It was the Covid-19 lockdown that arguably turned Bodhana into a prodigy. Lakshmy said that — like many parents — she and her husband were struggling to find enough to occupy their children when schools were closed.
“We didn’t know what to do with her, and that’s when she got into watching chess videos,” she said. “My husband found free videos for her to watch, and said that if she finished watching those within a month, he’d buy her the subscription. She finished it within a week.” She used YouTube and chesskid.com to hone her skills.
Bodhana played her first tournament in July 2021, a friendly against adults and children. The following March her parents realised quite how talented their daughter was when she won the silver medal in the under-8 girls’ group at the European Youth Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships at the age of six.
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Last December she made history at the European Rapid and Blitz Chess Tournament in Zagreb, Croatia, when she became the youngest girl to avoid defeat against a grandmaster in a competitive game. She had beaten the England women’s coach Lorin D’Costa, and then drawn with the grandmaster Vladislav Nevednichy in the final round. Bodhana said chess was a friendly game: older players were mostly generous about being beaten by a child and top players had given her tips and advice.
Bodhana said she did not feel an adrenaline rush when playing: “I just try to stay calm to find the best moves.” Her mother believes this temperament makes her well suited to chess. “She is very calm and composed — she never gets super-excited about anything,” Lakshmy said. “From her face, we can’t tell when she comes out of a match whether she won, drew or lost, her expression is always the same.”
Last August Bodhana met the former prime minister Rishi Sunak when he was highlighting the government’s investment in the game, so some of her friends have seen her on the news, but she said that she did not talk to them much about her love of chess.
At her school, St John Fisher Catholic Primary, teachers have set up a chess club, inspired by her success.
Bodhana, who also plays the violin and piano, excels in maths in school, and sees chess as related. “You have to calculate and sometimes you use pattern recognition,” she said.
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On school days, she trains at chess for an hour on her computer, playing against both real players and artificial intelligence, before doing her homework. The weekends are taken up by tournaments and more practice. For an hour a week, she receives training online from the English Chess Federation.
The family have not watched The Queen’s Gambit, the hit Netflix show that is credited with encouraging more female players to get into the sport, but they are big fans of the 2016 film, Queen of Katwe, about a girl growing up in a slum in Uganda who starts to play chess.
Bodhana hopes she too can inspire other girls; it is estimated that 69 per cent of chess players in the UK are male. “A few more girls are starting to play but I would love to encourage more to take it up,” she said.
