BENGALURU: At 8, A Charvi dreams big. On Tuesday, one of her dreams came true. The class 3 student of Capitol Public School here won the U-8 girls title at the World Cadet Chess Championships in Batumi, Georgia on Tuesday.
Charvi, the National U-8 and U-10 champion, was in a spot of bother after losing in the seventh round. But she bounced back in style to grab the title with a better tie-break score after she and Indian-origin English champion Bodhana Sivanandan ended with 9.5 points. The other Indian in the fray, Samhita Pungavanam, ended with 7.5 points.
"Though she was only the fifth seed, we were expecting Charvi to win the tournament outright but she lost in the seventh round. Full credit to her for bouncing back to clinch the title," Charvi's coach WGM Aarthie Ramaswamy told TOI.
Aarthie said it was too early to plot Charvi's career graph but the WGM was confident that the young girl had the qualities to make it big. "What makes her different is her will to win. There was a match in the Nationals which she was losing but she went on to win it. That's what makes her different at her age," said Aarthie, under whom Charvi has been training for the past year. "She should now play in higher-quality tournaments to improve further."
Recalling her journey to the top, Charvi's mother Akhila, who accompanied her daughter to Georgia, said: "She started playing chess at her playschool. She watched older kids play and got hooked," Akhila told TOI from Batumi.
Shubhi captures U-12 world title
Shubhi Gupta, who hails from Ghaziabad, scored 8.5 points from 11 rounds to claim the top prize in the under-12 event. India's Safin Safarulla Khan claimed a bronze medal in the under-8 category with nine points. The Kerala boy ended up half a point behind France's Marc Llari and Russian Sav Shogdzhiev.
