Today, Tay will go to chess club.
He puts his board and pieces in his bag.
He packs his clock.
Tay is ready…
from Tay: Tay Goes to Chess Club
written by Phelicia Lang
illustrated by Samanta Veliz
Me on the Page Publishing, 2019
Dad was a planner. He taught my sister and brother and me to play chess. It was a good way, he told us, to learn strategy, how to plan ahead.
I understood the game, as well as my ten-year-old self could, anyway. I studied how each piece moved around the board to guard his king. They were all men, even the queen. All the knights were men, and so were the pawns. No one even talked about the horses.
That didn’t bother me. It felt like the generic guys, like in Hey! you guys! and I never gave it a thought until now. Let’s save all that for a different day.
For now, I’ll introduce you to a much different ten-year-old, Bodhana Sivanandan, an extraordinary chess prodigy. She won against a 60-year-old grandmaster in Liverpool, England, on August 10, 2025.
What else was an almost six-year-old to do during the COVID-19 lockdown in London, whose parents gave her a new chess set? And just 15 months after learning the game, she was described as “exceptional.”
Two years after that, the eight-year-old Bodhana said, “I love to play chess because it helps me to recognise patterns, focus my attention and is helping me to learn how to strategise and calculate moves in advance. Also, I like the way the chess pieces move on the board, especially the knight.”
She learned to play on her new chess set by watching YouTube videos. Of course, she did! She likes to play against really good players. “[I learn] from what they are doing,” she said in a quote on GMA (Good Morning America, 8/15/25).
In 2023, she defeated Peter Lee, 81-year-old FIDE Master. FIDE is the French acronym for the International Chess Federation, founded in 1924, and serves as the governing agency for chess competitions worldwide.
And she’s been winning chess tournaments ever since. Her recent win makes her the youngest female chess player in history to win against a grandmaster. Malcolm Pein, himself an international master, predicts that Bodahana will become a grandmaster one day.
Lest she thinks she’s special, Bodhana joins the ranks of several other child prodigy chess players. In 2023, eight-year-old Ashwath Kaushik defeated 37-year-old Jacek Stopa in Switzerland. To find others, click on ChessKid.com.
Besides playing chess, her mom calls her a “normal” kid. Her other interests include piano, violin, and soccer. She’s also considering becoming the Prime Minister or maybe a doctor one day. “We just encourage her to go forward with her dreams,” said her mom on the GMA interview.
I changed my opinion of chess as I grew up. Besides objecting to all the “men,” games of war did not interest me. I viewed killing, pretty much anything, and still do, as something morally wrong. Chess, with all its war strategy, did not interest me anymore. Then I looked into what people gain when they play chess, and found some interesting reasons to reconsider.
Here are my favorites from Healthline.com and TheChessJournal.com.
Thanks, Dad!
I just finished reading Uncommon Measure by Natalie Hodges (Bellevue Literary Press, 2022). It’s the memoir of a young Korean American violinist who, after experiencing performance anxiety, decides to turn her creative gifts into an exploration of the human perception of music: how it relates to time, neuroscience, and quantum physics. And it’s surprisingly readable. Recommended.
-—Be curious! (and play hard, but work hard, too)
He puts his board and pieces in his bag.
He packs his clock.
Tay is ready…
from Tay: Tay Goes to Chess Club
written by Phelicia Lang
illustrated by Samanta Veliz
Me on the Page Publishing, 2019
Dad was a planner. He taught my sister and brother and me to play chess. It was a good way, he told us, to learn strategy, how to plan ahead.
I understood the game, as well as my ten-year-old self could, anyway. I studied how each piece moved around the board to guard his king. They were all men, even the queen. All the knights were men, and so were the pawns. No one even talked about the horses.
That didn’t bother me. It felt like the generic guys, like in Hey! you guys! and I never gave it a thought until now. Let’s save all that for a different day.
For now, I’ll introduce you to a much different ten-year-old, Bodhana Sivanandan, an extraordinary chess prodigy. She won against a 60-year-old grandmaster in Liverpool, England, on August 10, 2025.
What else was an almost six-year-old to do during the COVID-19 lockdown in London, whose parents gave her a new chess set? And just 15 months after learning the game, she was described as “exceptional.”
Two years after that, the eight-year-old Bodhana said, “I love to play chess because it helps me to recognise patterns, focus my attention and is helping me to learn how to strategise and calculate moves in advance. Also, I like the way the chess pieces move on the board, especially the knight.”
She learned to play on her new chess set by watching YouTube videos. Of course, she did! She likes to play against really good players. “[I learn] from what they are doing,” she said in a quote on GMA (Good Morning America, 8/15/25).
In 2023, she defeated Peter Lee, 81-year-old FIDE Master. FIDE is the French acronym for the International Chess Federation, founded in 1924, and serves as the governing agency for chess competitions worldwide.
And she’s been winning chess tournaments ever since. Her recent win makes her the youngest female chess player in history to win against a grandmaster. Malcolm Pein, himself an international master, predicts that Bodahana will become a grandmaster one day.
Lest she thinks she’s special, Bodhana joins the ranks of several other child prodigy chess players. In 2023, eight-year-old Ashwath Kaushik defeated 37-year-old Jacek Stopa in Switzerland. To find others, click on ChessKid.com.
Besides playing chess, her mom calls her a “normal” kid. Her other interests include piano, violin, and soccer. She’s also considering becoming the Prime Minister or maybe a doctor one day. “We just encourage her to go forward with her dreams,” said her mom on the GMA interview.
I changed my opinion of chess as I grew up. Besides objecting to all the “men,” games of war did not interest me. I viewed killing, pretty much anything, and still do, as something morally wrong. Chess, with all its war strategy, did not interest me anymore. Then I looked into what people gain when they play chess, and found some interesting reasons to reconsider.
Here are my favorites from Healthline.com and TheChessJournal.com.
- By anticipating an opponent’s moves, we widen our perspective. We become more able to “put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.”
- Playing chess improves our memory, both visual and auditory. Excelling at the game involves memorizing and predicting complicated patterns of moves.
- The activity of theta waves increases when we enter a flow state, the deep involvement we experience when we’re totally absorbed in the “task at hand,” whether it be athletic, artistic, or chess. In a flow state, we are most receptive to insight, imagination, and creativity.
- We build our planning skills during those long periods of silent concentration when we anticipate the consequences of our actions.
- Regular chess playing can increase our ability to focus on a task.
- We practice patience when we postpone a decisive move in anticipation of a more advantageous move or wait for our opponent to move.
- Related to growing our ability to be patient, we learn the importance of making sacrifices. We may choose to lose something now to receive something better in the future.
- We develop both halves of our brain when we play chess. Studies have shown that top chess players combine visual processing with analytical reasoning to reach decisions faster.
Thanks, Dad!
I just finished reading Uncommon Measure by Natalie Hodges (Bellevue Literary Press, 2022). It’s the memoir of a young Korean American violinist who, after experiencing performance anxiety, decides to turn her creative gifts into an exploration of the human perception of music: how it relates to time, neuroscience, and quantum physics. And it’s surprisingly readable. Recommended.
-—Be curious! (and play hard, but work hard, too)
RSS Feed