Ruqayyah Rida with her medal from the 2024 Cambridge International Open chess tournament. Photo: MRI
Michael Adams has now won seven major tournaments in a row without losing a single match.
The eight-time British champion trailed the leaders at last week's Cambridge International Open until the ninth and final round, but stepped up when it mattered to win the £1,500 prize for the second year in a row.
The Cornishman, 52, had already completed a series of Cambridge 2023, the English and British Championships, the World 50+ team and individual, and the London Classic before his latest win. He has proven himself as a photo-finish specialist, twice surpassing victory by the narrowest of tiebreak margins, while his current unbeaten streak in tournament matches stands at 39 wins and 24 draws.
In the decisive encounter, Adams defeated Jonah Willow in a game that the 21-year-old Nottingham master needed to win for his first GM Standard, but was steadily exhausted by the subtle skills of 'the spider'.
It looked like Sergei Tiviakov would win the event, but the Dutch and former Soviet GM, 51, botched a winning endgame in the penultimate round when the tournament was at his mercy. Other English players also missed their chances. General Manager Daniel Fernandez could not handle Adams, while Shreyas Royal, 15, had an off-tournament and lost ground in his quest to become England's youngest grandmaster.
The star performers, apart from Adams, were both pre-teen schoolgirls. Ruqayyah Rida, 12, from Colchester County High School, won the top female prize with 5.5/9 and a score of almost 2200.
By defeating GM Mark Hebden, one of the legends of the English Chess Explosion of the 1970s, in the sixth round, Rida probably became the third-youngest female player ever to defeat a grandmaster, surpassed only by 10-year-old Carissa Yip ( now the US Women's Champion) against GM Alexander Ivanov at the 2014 New England Open, and by 11-year-old Judit Polgar against GM Lev Gutman in Brussels 1987.
What followed was even better, as Rida drew her seventh-round match against popular chess author GM Peter Wells, most likely becoming the youngest female player ever to score against two GMs in consecutive classic games. Wells wrote: "Very impressed with Ruqayyah - not only her dispatchable play, but also her reaction afterwards and contributions to the commentary. A fantastic achievement."
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Rida said Bobby Fischer is her chess hero, John Nunn is her favorite English player and Glenn Flear is her coach. Her ambition is to continue playing for England at the next biennial Under-16 Olympiad in 2025.
Bodhana Sivanandan continued her excellent recent run by finishing second woman with 4.5/9. The eight-year-old shone in a blitz against Europe's best women in Monaco in January and went on to score well in the 4NCL League and the Gonzaga Open.
Fide's March classic ratings list ranks Sivanandan as the best under 10 in the world after her Cambridge result, with 2088 rating points, 97 ahead of her nearest rival. Two English boys, Kushal Jakhria and Ethan Pang, are in fifth and tenth place.
It is in no time that Sivanandan's performances are truly out of this world. On the recently published March Fide blitz list of the top 100 girls born after 2003, she already ranks 20th with a rating of 2185, despite being the youngest player on the entire list by at least four years.
This statistic reflects her sensational performances in the European Blitz in Warsaw and the European Women's Blitz in Monaco. In the first she was top female, top junior and top English player; in the second, she finished 15th out of 105, winning or drawing against several elite players and beating the 2023 World Cup finalist in the final round.
The two greatest women of all time, Polgar and Hou Yifan, never played competitively at the age of eight, although there were reports of Polgar beating the masters at blitz at home. Polgar had a record 2555 classic rating at age 12, and Hou played a women's world championship match at age 14, so 2185 appearances for both at age 8 would probably have been feasible, although difficult.
The best of the new wave of eight-year-olds, who learned and got involved in chess during the pandemic lockdown, are probably Singapore's Ashwath Kaushik, the youngest ever, at eight years and six months, to beat a grandmaster, and Roman Shogdzhiev, the Russian who defeated five GMs at the World Rapid and Blitz in December.
Both have played fewer classic tournaments than Sivanandan, and their ratings still lag behind their true strength. Kaushik already played with Australian GM Moulthon Ly in Thailand in July, is said to have a photographic memory, is sharp in tactics, solves endgame studies quickly and works two to seven hours a day on chess.
The boy from Singapore sounds like the real deal, just like Shogdzhiev, who competed at the Masters in Moscow for two years before his World Rapid/Blitz success. In the just-published March Fide blitz list, players nine years old or younger Shogdzhiev is rated first at 2198, ahead of Sivanandan at 2185. Argentina's Faustino Oro, who at age nine already has the youngest 2300 rating and the youngest IM standard , is the other talent that qualifies. out. In the latest rankings of the English women's organization Fide, Sivanandan is already at number 10 and Rida at number 27.
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Realistically, it will be difficult for others to compete with this emerging super-GM trio, but the rise of Sivanandan and now Rida still opens up another opportunity. If they continue to improve, they could become serious contenders for the England women's team by the time of the 2026 Women's Olympiad in Uzbekistan.
The action moves to Peterborough this weekend for the annual British Rapidplay Championship, 11 rounds of one-hour matches spread over two days.
Four GMs and 13 IMs are in the field of over 200, and top-ranked GM Daniel Gormally's new book Chess Analysis - Reloaded is proving popular. Sivanandan is ranked 66th overall and seventh among women. A question this weekend will be whether she can transfer her superior skills in a five-minute blitz to the slower pace of an hour fast.
To watch the UK Rapidplay live, go to lichess.org, click watch and then click broadcasts. The matches start on Saturday at 12:30 PM and on Sunday at 10:00 AM.
3909: 1 Qa4! If c3 2 Qe8 c3/cxb2 3 Nh3 mate. If cxb3 2 Bg1! Kxf4 3 Be3 mate.
