At 5, She Picked Up Chess as a Pandemic Hobby. At 9, She’s a Prodigy.

Since learning chess during a pandemic lockdown, Bodhana Sivanandan has won a European title in the game, qualified for this year’s prestigious Chess Olympiad tournament, and established herself as one of England’s best players.

She also turned 9 in March. That makes Bodhana, a prodigy from the London borough of Harrow, the youngest player to represent England at such an elite level in chess, and quite possibly the youngest in any international sporting competition.

“I was happy and I was ready to play,” Bodhana said in a phone interview, two days after she learned that she had been selected for this year’s Olympiad, an international competition considered to be the game’s version of the Olympics.

The fourth-grader, who learned chess four years ago when she stumbled across a board her father was planning to discard, knows exactly what she wants to accomplish next. “I’m trying to become the youngest grandmaster in the world,” she said, “and also one of the greatest players of all time.”

She has some three years to achieve her first goal. The youngest person to become grandmaster, the highest distinction other than world champion, is Abhimanyu Mishra, an American player who was 12 years, 4 months and 25 days when he became grandmaster in 2021.

International masters have called Bodhana a phenomenon since she burst onto the competitive chess scene that same year. She beat adults for the first women’s prize in the European Blitz Chess Championship last December, and currently holds the title of woman master from the International Chess Federation.