Making of a Clutch Queen
The Indian Women’s team for the 46th FIDE Chess Olympiad had a new face this year, and that player made quite an impression. I am talking about Savitha Shri B, who made her Olympiad debut this year. The 19-year-old went on to become one of India’s standout performers, scoring an incredible 9/10 and winning the individual gold medal on Board 5.
If you watched Savitha Shri B's game against Elnaz Kaliakhmet of Kazakhstan in Round 8, you would know just how much was riding on that one game. After Vaishali lost her game and Humpy and Divya had drawn theirs, India needed a win on the fourth board to avoid losing the match. All eyes were on Savitha!
She had already been delivering for India since Round 1, winning six games in a row. So, with the team needing another crucial point, the expectation was naturally on her. And guess what? She did it! Savitha defeated Kaliakhmet to secure a 2-2 draw for India against Kazakhstan. In fact, the only match India has lost came in the one round when Savitha did not play.
How important Savitha has been for the Indian team in her very first Olympiad!! To understand how Savitha arrived at this stage, we have to go back to where it all started...
When Savitha was around four or five years old, her brother would play chess, and little Savitha would sit nearby and watch him play. Seeing her genuine interest in the game, her father took her to tournaments, where she started performing well.
Nationals, Asian Championships and World Junior Championships... Savitha started travelling to bigger tournaments. It turned into a serious chess journey. Savitha's father, Basker, gave up his job as an electrician in Singapore and chose to travel with her.
She was the 32nd National U-11 Girls Chess Champion in 2018!
In January 2019, just two months after winning the World Under-12 title, Savitha met Frederic Friedel, co-founder of ChessBase, at a tournament in Mumbai. He gave her a puzzle he has used to test young talents for decades. You can read about their meeting in this article. Savitha, completely undistracted by everything happening around her, solved the puzzle.
Around the same time, a London-based engineer named Deepan Subbiah learned that Savitha's family was struggling to afford the travel that international tournaments demanded. He decided to help and started a small fundraiser to support her chess journey. You can read more about that story, including his trip to Austria to watch her play, here.
This is a girl who started playing chess because she wanted to keep up with her brother, who once gave a 15-board simul and won every game, and whose father gave up his job as an electrician just so she could keep playing. Every norm, every rating jump, it was all building toward moments like this. Her journey makes it very clear that this is far from the last time we will be writing about her!
