Good newsBodhana Sivanandan, 11, Breaks Judit Polgar's 38-Year-Old Record for Youngest Female IM
Bodhana Sivanandan, an 11-year-old from Harrow, qualified for the International Master title at 11 years and seven months in Budva, Montenegro. Judit Polgar was 12 when she did it in 1988.
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Bodhana Sivanandan needed one more result in the last round, and she found it in 32 moves. Playing for England’s She Plays To Win Lionesses at the European Women’s Club Cup in Budva, Montenegro, the 11-year-old from Harrow beat Sweden’s Viktoria Johansson on Friday. The win gave her the final norm for the International Master (IM) title at 11 years and seven months, the English Chess Federation says. That makes her the youngest female player to qualify for the title.
A record from 1988
The previous mark belonged to Judit Polgar, widely regarded as the strongest female player in history, who qualified for the IM title at 12 in 1988. Bodhana was 11 years and seven months old, so the record falls by a matter of months. The IM title is open to players of both sexes, unlike the women-only titles, and sits one step below Grandmaster. It normally requires three IM norms, which are strong tournament performances, plus a FIDE rating of 2400.
Malcolm Pein, the federation’s director of international chess, calls her a generational talent. He also puts the record in proportion: she is the seventh youngest IM of either sex, according to the federation. The Press Trust of India, in The Hindu, lists the others in the youngest ten as India’s R. Praggnanandhaa and D. Gukesh, Uzbekistan’s Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Argentina’s Faustino Oro, Turkey’s Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus and Russia’s Roman Shogdzhiev.
| Milestone | Player | Age | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| IM title | Judit Polgar | 12 | 1988 |
| IM title | Bodhana Sivanandan | 11 years, 7 months | October 2026 |
| Woman Grandmaster (WGM) title | Bodhana Sivanandan | Youngest ever, per the federation | September 2026 |
How the week went
The Hindu reports that Bodhana scored 5.5 out of 7 on board one for her team, citing the European Chess Union. She came close to drawing her opening match against Russia’s Aleksandra Goryachkina, a grandmaster. She then beat Belarus’s Olga Badelka, an IM rated above 2400, which took her rating to 2399.4. The federation adds that she drew with Georgian grandmaster Nino Batsiashvili, a former European women’s champion, and beat Croatia’s Ena Cvitan and Lithuania’s Arina Budiak.
She came to Montenegro already holding two of the three norms. One came last month at the Chess Olympiad in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where she played top board for England and scored eight points from 11 games, losing once. That result also made her the youngest player to qualify for the Woman Grandmaster title, the federation says. It then took the week in Budva to complete the IM set, as the final norm fell on the last day.
What comes next
The federation says her next event is the FIDE Swiss at the 16th London Chess Classic. It also credits her parents for supporting her, and thanks former prime minister Rishi Sunak and former chancellor Rachel Reeves for backing government help for chess through the culture department. Pein notes that she is more than matching Polgar’s achievements at a similar age, even though the two grew up in different times.
Records like this one are measured in months, and Bodhana is still eleven. Her rating has to hold at the 2400 level the title normally requires, and each new tournament tests that. London is the next one, so the answer to what an 11-year-old can do against stronger fields arrives within weeks.
