Among the top ten u-20 girls at age 11
Bodhana Sivanandan has continued a sequence of notable results that have marked her out as one of the most remarkable young players in the world. Having turned eleven on 7 March, the British prodigy recently crossed the 2300 rating threshold for the first time, thereby securing the FIDE Master (FM) title. The milestone followed a sustained run of strong performances between early February and the beginning of March, during which she gained a total of 203 rating points.
Bodhana has regularly attracted international attention over the past two years thanks to a series of record-breaking achievements. In July 2025, at the age of ten, she became the youngest player ever to obtain a WGM norm, surpassing the mark previously set by Hou Yifan, who had achieved the same feat at eleven in 2005. The following month, she defeated GM Peter Wells at the British Chess Championship. That victory made her the youngest girl to ever beat a grandmaster, improving on the previous record held by Carissa Yip by more than six months, and simultaneously provided the final norm required for the WIM title — also at a record-breaking age.
Bodhana Sivanandan 1-0 Peter Wells
British Championship 2025
Her most recent rating surge was built on three consecutive tournament appearances. The first took place in the 4NCL Division 2 team competition on 7–8 February, where she played in rounds five and six for “She Plays To Win Lionesses”. She held both Roman Kovalskyi of Ukraine (2174) and Ieysaa Bin-Suhayl of Italy (2207) to draws, laying the groundwork for further rating gains.
She then travelled to Austria to compete in the Graz Open, where she scored 5 points from 9 games with a Tournament Performance Rating of 2381. This result alone brought her 102 rating points. Her tournament included two victories, against Austria’s Peter Balint (2444) and Croatia’s Lovro Novosel (2326).
A week before turning 11, she confirmed that this was no isolated performance at the Cannes Chess Festival. Once again scoring 5/9, she faced exclusively titled opposition and achieved a TPR of 2377, adding a further 98 rating points to her tally. Although defeats in the final two rounds prevented her from securing what would have been her first IM norm, her overall showing included four wins – three against FMs and one against an IM — all within the 2257–2358 rating range.
As a consequence of these results, Sivanandan’s live rating climbed to 2366, placing her 9th on the global list for girls under 20. She is clearly the youngest player in the top 20 of that ranking – the second-youngest player there is Sri Lanka’s Devindya Oshini Gunawardhana, who is three years older.
Source: 2700chess.com
Within her own birth cohort (players born in 2015), the English girl of Indian descent stands among the leading talents not only in the girls’ category. Her rating is comparable with that of prominent boys of the same generation, including Russia’s Roman Shogdzhiev and Singapore’s Ashwath Kaushik.
Born in London on 7 March 2015 and raised in Harrow, Bodhana is the daughter of parents who moved to the United Kingdom from Tiruchirappalli, India, in 2007. She only began playing chess during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, yet her development was rapid. By March 2022 – just fifteen months after taking up the game – she had already been described as “exceptional” by legendary chess columnist Leonard Barden.
All available games by Bodhana – 4NCL (2), Graz (1), Cannes (1)
In a total of 6 chapters, we look at the following aspects: the right decision based on tactical factors, decisions in exchanges and moves, complex and psychological decisions in longer games and in defence.