Tani Adewumi was born on September 3, 2010, in Nigeria, of devout Christian parents. When the family was threatened with violence by the Islamist terrorist organization Boko Haram, they left Nigeria for the United States, in 2017, and sought religious asylum. They were given a place to stay in a homeless shelter in Manhattan, and Tani was enrolled in elementary school.
The lad took to chess very naturally. Full details are to be found on his Wikipedia page. On March 2019, Tani competed in the 52nd Annual New York State Scholastic Championships K-3 division (kindergarten to 3rd grade). He was seeded eighth and had an Elo rating of 1473, over 200 behind the top rated players, some of whom were from well-to-do families and had private coaches. Tani won the event with a score of 5.5/6, playing aggressively, sacrificing pieces. We wrote about this at the time in a ChessBase report, and the story was reported by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, and gained national and international attention. Garry Kasparov praised his achievement, and Bill Clinton invited him to visit at his office in Harlem. In March last year he visited the Saint Louis Chess Club in Missouri, and played several blitz games against Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura and Jennifer Yu. He was also interviewed by Maurice Ashley.
Here's a game Tani played at the NYS Scholastic Championship
After the 2019 New York Scholastics a GoFundMe crowdfunding action was started, with the goal of $50,000 for the Adewumi family. It raised $254,000 in ten days, one-tenth of which they donated to the church which had initially helped them, and put the rest into the Tanitoluwa Adewumi Foundation to help other children in similar circumstances.
Three film companies have competed for the rights to his story (Paramount Pictures won), and an autobiography, My Name Is Tani, was published in April this year.
Tani’s ambition is to become the youngest ever chess grandmaster. Quite a tall task, since the record (by Sergey Karjakin) is 12 years and seven months. And a problem has arisen: the Covid pandemic has shut down all the events Tani had planned to participate in, to move forward towards his goal.
On Thursday in CBS there was a 3½ minute report on Tani and his ambitions. It is inspiring to hear him speak on his hopes and aspirations.
