7/7 points, rating performance 2955!

by Frederic Friedel
9/25/2026 – We have seen a lot of great performances at the Olympiad in Samarkand – many great players have lived up to their high standards. But it is especially pleasing to see chess prodigies you have known and looked after since their early teens deliver the goods. Like this batch, who have been surging. One has scored in absolutely record-breaking style. You'll never guess who.
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Here are the players I have known since they were ten, eleven and twelve years old, young talents I have looked after for almost a decade. They are participants at the Olympiad in Samarkand, and are fulfilling – nay exceeding – my expectation. Especially one of them...

Remarkable performances

This is Praggnanandhaa. In 2019 we invited him to a training camp in Chens Sur Leman, France, where I first got to know him. It was stunning watching the 13-year-old discuss complex chess positions with trainer Vladimir Kramnik, almost at an equal level of comprehension of the game. I also had a lot of fun giving him logical problems. He also visited ChessBase in Hamburg and had training sessions with the software experts here.

In Samarkand Pragg has scored 4½/8 points so far, against very strong opponents (he beat Anish Giri). His rating performance is 2759, which almost exactly matches his international rating. Pragg is currently number eight in the world, and the highest rated Indian player.  

This is a picture of the twelve-year prodigy Gukesh, taken on January 7th 2019, minutes after I had been first introduced to him. He was clearly on the path to earn a full grandmaster title, which he did a week later, becoming the second-youngest grandmaster in history. I visited him and his family a number of times, and helped with his training, for example in camps in France and Chennai. Gukesh also stayed in my house in Hamburg and got training from ChessBase experts. In 2024, at the age of 18 years and 195 days, he became the youngest World Chess Champion in history.

So how is he doing in Samarkand? Right now he is 6½/8 with a rating performance of 2739

This is Bodhana, whom I got to know when she was ten years old. A few months later she became the youngest pre-teen female to defeat a 2600+ rated GM. I invited her to Hamburg, and in the above picture she is training with our endgame expert Karsten Müller in the ChessBase office. There is a full report on her visit here.

At the Olympiad in Samarkand, playing of board one of the English team, the eleven-year-old has scored six point in eight games, with a rating performance of 2403.

Truly remarkable performance

I got to know Savitha Shri around twenty minutes before being introduced to Gukesh in Mumbai in 2019. She was eleven years old, and I did my talent test with her and Gukesh. That is described in this YouTube video by Sagar Shah from ChessBase India. We stayed in touch and I invited her to visit ChessBase in Hamburg. She came over to take part in a training session with Karsten Müller.

Now I get some electrifying news from Samarkand. The 19-year-old Savitha, playing for the India Women's team, has won all seven game she played in, and chalked up a performance rating of 2955! Wow, that has to be a record.

Savitha in Samarkand, with captain Swayams Mishra | Photo: Michal Walusza

In this Fritztrainer: “Attack like a Super GM” with Gukesh we touch upon all aspects of his play, with special emphasis on how you can become a better attacking player.

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Editor-in-Chief emeritus of the ChessBase News page. Studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and Oxford, graduating with a thesis on speech act theory and moral language. He started a university career but switched to science journalism, producing documentaries for German TV. In 1986 he co-founded ChessBase.
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