Four and a half points from six games. One more result, and the youngest female International Master in chess history will be an 11-year-old from England.

Bodhana Sivanandan plays the final round of the 41st European Club Cup in Budva, Montenegro, with the start scheduled for 2pm local time on Friday. Her live FIDE rating stands at 2399.4, 0.6 points below the 2400 needed for the IM title. She has two of the three IM norms the title demands. Round 7 can deliver both the norm and the rating in a single afternoon.

The maths of what she needs is unusually clean. A win against a 2034-rated opponent is enough. So is a draw against a 2116. Beyond the IM title she already holds the Woman Grandmaster title. The IM is the open title, not gender-restricted, the one Judit Polgar first claimed as a 12-year-old in 1988.

4.5/6, with the only loss to the top seed

Sivanandan plays for She Plays To Win Lionesses A. Her Budva card so far reads loss, win, win, draw, win, win. The loss came in round one, against Russia’s former world championship challenger Aleksandra Goryachkina, the highest-rated player in the women’s section. She drew Georgian grandmaster Nino Batsiashvili in round four, then held her nerve for consecutive wins in rounds five and six: a swindle against Ena Cvitan, who had reached a clearly winning position before faltering in time trouble, then a straightforward victory over Arina Budiak of Klaipeda.

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Those two wins pulled her tournament performance back above the 2450 benchmark an IM norm requires, and left the final round as a shoot-out.

A 2026 that keeps rewriting the record book

The IM title would be her fourth age record of the year.

• In July, at the Dole Open in France, she opened the tournament by beating French champion Marc’Andria Maurizzi, rated 2628, to become the youngest girl ever to defeat a grandmaster rated above 2600 in classical chess.
• Later in the same event she took her first IM norm, undercutting a Polgar benchmark of 11 years, nine months set in 1988.
• In September at the Women’s Chess Olympiad in Samarkand she earned her final WGM norm and her second IM norm in the same event, becoming the youngest Woman Grandmaster in history at 11 years, six months and 18 days, a mark Guinness has now certified.

After the Olympiad she set out her stall plainly.

“I’m happy to do it, but I want to keep going and keep making history as well, instead of just stopping here,” she told Chess.com.

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What a win or draw clinches today

Polgar earned her IM title at 12. If Sivanandan wins or draws on the required pairing, she will complete the title at 11, breaking a mark that has outlived every other female age record Polgar once held.

She will also, in the same movement, pass 2400 on the live rating list. The published October list has her at 2382; the live list, which absorbs every result in real time, carries the 2399.4 figure. One win over a 2034 or a draw against a 2116, and she clears both bars at once.

Live boards for the final round of the European Club Cup are being broadcast from Budva from 2pm local time.

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