She’s the Newest Queen of Chess—and She’s Only 11 Years Old

Said T. Spritzler, Bodhana's agent and chess coach, "I just entered her in the Scripts National Spelling Bee. The kid's literally a cash machine".

She’s the Newest Queen of Chess—and She’s Only 11 Years Old

Though Bodhana Sivanandan picked up the game just six years ago, she is now a British champion. And she routinely beats men and women many times her age.

By Andrew Beaton, WSJ

Aug. 14, 2026 6:00 am ET

Bodhana Sivanandan won Britain’s women’s chess championship at age 11.

At 11 years old, Bodhana Sivanandan has become Britain’s youngest ever women’s chess champion.

Less than a minute remained on the clock during the biggest chess match of Bodhana Sivanandan’s short career last weekend, but to her, it was practically an eternity.

As Sivanandan stared at the board, with Britain’s women’s chess championship on the line, it took her all of 12 seconds to calculate the decisive move: a knight sacrifice that would result in her capturing the queen. Understanding what was about to happen, her opponent had little choice but to extend her hand and resign.

The only thing more stunning than the move was the age of the person who made it. At 11 years old, Sivanandan had just been crowned as Britain’s youngest ever women’s chess champion.

“I didn’t have much time,” she says. “But I had enough to see that move and look for it and make sure it was good. So I didn’t doubt myself.”

Since taking up the game six years ago, Sivanandan has emerged as one of the greatest prodigies chess has ever seen. She is already the highest-rated woman in England, and the sight of her toppling much older and more experienced men and women has become the norm. Last year, Sivanandan became the youngest girl to defeat a grandmaster in classical chess when she bested 60-year-old Peter Wells. She recently toppled France’s No. 3-rated player, grandmaster Marc’Andria Maurizzi.

“She’s an absolute rock star, regardless of the fact that she’s a young girl, and on pace to be one of the best players in the world, regardless of gender,” says Danny Rensch, Chess.com’s chief chess officer. “She has a presence of like, ‘I’m gonna kill you no matter what.’”

Sivanandan first found chess during the 2020 lockdowns, but unlike the adults who were swept up that year through the mega-popular show “The Queen’s Gambit,” she stumbled into the game by accident. Just five years old at the time, she saw a board that a family friend had given her father and wanted to use the pieces as toys. Instead, her dad taught her how the pieces were actually supposed to move.

It turned out that Sivanandan was a natural. Soon enough, she was beating her old man and learning on her own, scouring videos online for instruction. By the time she played her first tournament in London, she was hooked, and it wouldn’t take long for the chess world to notice that there was an unusually precocious girl on the scene.

At championships for European school children in 2022, barely a year after she first learned that bishops move along a diagonal, Sivanandan went on to win all 24 of her matches. And she quickly outgrew playing against people her own age. The next year, she beat former British champion Peter Lee, then 79, in an exhibition. Later in 2023, she won the top women’s prize in the European championship blitz competition, where players have to make lightning-fast moves under time pressure.

To onlookers, it was astonishing seeing a schoolgirl in a headband outwit adults who had been competing at top-flight events since before she was born. But Sivanandan understood that age didn’t determine who would win.

“At the start it felt a bit strange, but now I’m used to it,” she says. “I thought it didn’t really matter how much older they were or anything.”

But Sivanandan didn’t give up on being a normal kid. She attends school, where she’s entering Year 7—the equivalent of sixth grade in America—and doesn’t have a set routine for studying chess. Instead, she just fits it in when she can between piano and violin lessons.

On the board, Sivanandan is just scratching the surface of her potential. Earlier this year, she was awarded the title of FIDE master and became the youngest girl ever to achieve a qualifying standard to become an international master, beating a record set by the legendary Judit Polgar in 1988. And Polgar might just be the best comparison for Sivandandan’s rise. She was the only woman who has ever been ranked in the world’s overall top 10, and famously notched wins against the leading men, including Garry Kasparov.

For Sivanandan, the next objective is to reach grandmaster status as soon as possible. Clinching the British championship was merely the beginning.

“I was happy,” she says. “But still I want to keep going and not stop here.”

Andrew Beaton is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York covering the NFL, golf and sports. Andrew's coverage has included breaking news about the biggest subjects in football, such as the controversy over player protests during the national anthem, in addition to features about transcendent players and the evolution of the sport. His stories have also documented the battle for the future of golf, which earned him recognition in 2022 from Sabew.

Andrew also likes to cover the oddities of the rapidly booming chess world. He first joined the Journal as an intern in 2014 after graduating from Duke University.