England's Bodhana Sivanandan Defeats Grandmaster; Fide Election Candidates Emerge Amid Sanctions

England’s 11-year-old talent Bodhana Sivanandan scored her best individual result last Saturday, when the Harrow schoolgirl defeated France’s 2628-rated grandmaster Marc’Andria Maurizzi, 19, in the opening round of the Dole Trophy in Aix-en-Provence. Maurizzi was world under-20 junior champion in 2023 and is the current French champion.

Sivanandan had beaten two GMs previously, but neither was as eminent as Maurizzi, and her result is a new world age record for a girl to defeat a grandmaster rated over 2600. The Frenchman held the advantage for the first 27 moves but then blundered into a tactic which won his queen for inadequate compensation.

The previous record holder was the all-time women’s No 1, Judit Polgar, who defeated GM Lajos Portisch, a former world title candidate but then on the wrong side of 50, in the 1988 Hungarian Championship when she was aged 12 years and two months.

At 11 years four months, Sivanandan also became the fifth youngest pre-teen to defeat a 2600+ rated GM, following in the footsteps of Nodirbek Abdusattorov, who did it at nine, Faustino Oro at 10, and Roman Shogdzhiev and Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu at 11 years one month.

Sivanandan could not maintain her stellar form into last Sunday’s round two, when she lost to the Israeli international master Benny Aizenberg, but in Monday’s third round she delivered another strong result when she drew with GM Maxim Rodshtein, the current Israel No 2. Rodshtein’s peak rating was 2710 a decade ago, and his achievements include winning the Israel Championship and the prestigious Rilton Cup in Stockholm.

After Thursday’s sixth round of nine, Sivanandan had scored three points against mostly much higher rated opponents and was in contention for her second norm (of three needed) for the women’s grandmaster title. She scored her first WGM norm at 10, also a world age record, at the same Dole Open in 2025.

The Quantbox Chennai Grandmasters, which finished on Wednesday, was another success for Alireza Firouzja, who regained his place in the live classical ratings world top 10: Final scores were Firouzja (France) 4.5/7, Dmitry Andreikin (Fide/Russia) and Arjun Erigaisi (India) 4, Abdusattorov (Uzbekistan), Pranesh Munirethinam and Nihal Sarin (both India) all 3.5, Hans Niemann (US) 3, Gukesh Dommaraju (India) 2.

Reigning world champion Gukesh’s disastrous 2026 continued. Earlier in the year, he did poorly in Wijk aan Zee and Prague, then finished last of six in Oslo. Now he has ended up last of eight in his home city of Chennai, failing to win a single game. He has dropped to a record low of 31st in the live ratings with a score of just 2703, barely above the elite base of 2700. He has one more classical event, the Olympiad in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, before his world championship match against his in-form challenger, Javokhir Sindarov.

The omens could hardly be worse, but the world title match will start with a clean sheet, and Gukesh could yet rediscover his 2024 form when he won the Candidates and then the championship match against China’s Ding Liren.

The election for president of Fide will take place in September during the 2026 Olympiad at Samarkand. Nominations close on Sunday and so far there are four candidates:

1: Arkady Dvorkovich, the incumbent Russian who has held the office since 2018, would have been the favourite to be re-elected for a third term, but on Thursday he was personally sanctioned by the EU with a visa ban and an asset freeze due to his alleged role, which he denies, in aiding chess events in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Dvorkovich has now suspended his own presidential functions. The Fide deputy president, India’s ex-world champion GM Viswanathan Anand, will act as interim president. Dvorkovich’s nominated deputy in the election would have been Timur Turlov, president of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation and the billionaire chair of the Nasdaq-listed Freedom Holding, who now has until a 26 July deadline to stand as Fide president. Chess.com has an article on the implications for international chess of the latest developments.

2: Jan Henric Buettner, the German multi-millionaire founder of Freestyle Chess, with its random placement of back rank pieces. Buettner’s deputy president would be Malcolm Pein, the executive editor of CHESS magazine and England’s international director. The Buettner-Pein ticket backed the winner at last weekend’s European Chess Union elections.

3: Wadim Rosenstein, also a German multi-millionaire and head of WR Holdings, a diversified international company. Rosenstein sponsored Fide’s new Rapid and Blitz team championships and played on the amateur board in the WR Chess teams which won gold in 2024 and 2025. His latest venture is the USA v Uzbekistan rapid and blitz match, which takes place in Miami on Monday and Tuesday.

4: Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, whose self-nomination is a major surprise. The eccentric former ruler of Kalmykia, a semi-autonomous state on the Caspian Sea, was Fide president from 1995 to 2018, but is best remembered for his claim to have been abducted by yellow-clad aliens into their spaceship. The full story of that entertaining incident is narrated in this article in Edward Winter’s highly regarded Chess Notes.