A new generation took over at the top of British chess on Sunday, when a trio of youthful talents demonstrated their skills on a national stage. Shreyas Royal, 17, of Dartford, Kent, became the youngest ever British champion, breaking Michael Adams’s 1989 record by two months and underlining his status as an emerging world-class talent. Bodhana Sivanandan, aged 11, and Supratit Banerjee, 12, also delivered memorable performances.
First prize at the University of Warwick, Coventry, was £10,000. The established grandmasters did not go gently into that good night. Adams finished just short of what he needed to equal Jonathan Penrose’s record of 10 championship wins, while top-seeded Luke McShane also tied for second, half a point behind Royal. (Correction: Adams’s 38-year unbeaten record in British Championships was 118 games, not 87 as stated here last week.) The final British Championship scores were Royal 7.5/9, Adams and McShane 7, Harry Grieve, Svyatoslav Bazakutsa (Ukraine), Siva Mahadevan (India) and Simon Williams 6.5, Banerjee and nine others on 6.
Sivanandan and Trisha Kanyamarala (Ireland) tied for the British women’s title, which was incorporated into the open competition, with 5.5/9. Sivanandan won the playoff 1.5-0.5. Royal’s family immigrated from India when he was aged three, but his father’s IT work visa ran out in 2018 and it required high-level government intervention, sparked by the boy’s chess promise, to renew it.
At 15, Royal broke David Howell’s record as England’s youngest ever GM. His championship title was an impressive result. He was the only unbeaten player among the 107 competitors, and his performance rating of 2688, close to the elite 2700 level, was highlighted by a crucial win against McShane, achieved in imaginative style, with its zenith 22 Rd4!
Royal’s achievement would have earned a place in the five-man England squad for next month’s 210-team world Olympiad in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, but the entry deadline for that was mid-July when his official Fide rating was below other contenders. The fifth selection, GM Dan Fernandez, bypassed the British Championship but won a strong international tournament at Vlissingen in the Netherlands, which had coincidental dates to Coventry. Royal’s career-best performances until now have been in the 2024 British Championship, where he scored his third and final GM norm, and in 2025, when he won the prestigious Tournament of Peace at Zagreb, Croatia.
Some of his other results have been uneven, which explains why his Fide world rating will only rise to 2533 after Coventry. This may restrict his international invitations. One way to capitalise on his new breakthrough could be via matches against elite opponents.
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