City girl becomes world’s youngest female to get FIDE chess rating

Jiaana Garg, 5, makes history as the youngest female to achieve an international FIDE rating at 1558, mentored by Chandigarh Chess Association VP Naveen Bansal.

Jiaana Garg, a student of Strawberry Fields High School, Chandigarh, created history by achieving the rare feat of getting an international FIDE (World Chess Federation) rating at the age of 5 years and 11 months. Her first ever rating that appeared on the FIDE website on May 1, 2024 is 1558. She is the only female rated player in the world who got a rating at this age.

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Jiaana has been participating in different FIDE ratings chess tournaments for the last two years. This year, she has started scoring against the rated players to earn her first rating. In the 3rd Matrix FIDE rating chess tournament, she scored 2.5 points (won two games and drew one to earn 2.5 points) against 8 rated players.

Jiaana was trained and mentored by Chandigarh Chess Association’s vice-president Naveen Bansal. “She has been the only child in my training career of more than 15 years who started taking chess classes at the age of 4.5 years. At first, I refused to start with her as usually we don’t take children less than the age of 5. But her mother sent me a video of the child just to convince me that she is disciplined and can focus on chess class,” said Bansal. “After a few months of training by looking at her pickup and dedication, for experiment’s sake, we put her in our most advanced batch with the idea that she could just listen to my lectures, doesn’t matter how much she understands. We realised she started responding at par with other children who were all rated and were much older (double or triple) to her age. That was the turning point for us to think about differently about her.”