The win slipped out of Gukesh’s grasp like sand. India’s open team were held to a draw by Azerbaijan. But Savitha persevered in a game where a chance to push for a win was negligible. Then, somehow, she managed to squeeze water out of stone and converted a dead draw into a decisive victory.

Before Samarkand 2026, Savitha had not been in the Indian Olympiad team’s plans. Even at Samarkand, her debut over-the-board Olympiad appearance would happen only as the Indian women’s team’s reserve player, someone who would slot in when one of the top four of Koneru Humpy, Vaishali, Divya Deshmukh and Vantika Agrawal would rest for the round. Over the last 8 rounds, she’s become virtually undroppable. She’s won each of the seven games she has played in, while India suffered defeat to Poland in the one round she sat out.

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Savitha Shri playing Magnus Carlsen as a child.

As Savitha persevered against her opponent in Samarkand, back home in Chennai, a proud father thought back to the radical decision he took to nurture Savitha’s career when she was young.

Baskar had been an electrical technician in Singapore when Savitha’s promise on the chess board became apparent. Soon he made the decision to quit his job, and move back to India to become his daughter’s full-time chaperone.

“A funny thing happened. I had savings which I thought would be good for five or six years, maybe even 10 years. But that didn’t even last three years because bringing up a chess player is expensive, with travel and coaching,” Baskar tells .

After coming back to India, helping his daughter became a full-time occupation. It helped that she was exceptionally talented. After picking up the sport at the age of four, in just a few years’ time, she was squaring off against arguably the greatest chess player in history: Magnus Carlsen. Baskar narrates the tale: about two months before Carlsen was to play in his first World Championship clash against Viswanathan Anand in 2013, the Norwegian World No 1 had descended on Chennai for a recce of the playing hall and other arrangements. He was coaxed into playing 20 Indian kids in a simul (an exhibition match where a grandmaster simultaneously plays multiple players by moving around from one board to another). Four players had defeated him, including Vaishali, while six pulled off draws. Little Savitha was one of the 10 who lost. But a photograph of that moment that Bhaskar still has, shows a tiny Savitha, aged around six, sitting at the table in her school uniform, staring defiantly back at Carlsen, waiting for him to make a move.

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“Back then, she was too young to realise anything. She just had fun playing a chess game,” chuckles Baskar.

Savitha’s five wins also mean she’s India’s best player in terms of form in Samarkand across the two Indian teams. (Rafal Oleksiewicz/FIDE)

As she grew, she developed a remarkable ability to go on rating streaks where she would play a bunch of tournaments in Europe and return with her rating almost multiplying. One of these streaks came just before the pandemic where she piled on over 300 points in a heady span of two months. Her second streak came incidentally during the 2022 Olympiad, where she gained 209 rating points in five tournaments to briefly become India no 4 behind Humpy, Harika Dronavalli, and Vaishali.

Playing for India at the Chess Olympiad, Baskar says, has been a dream for his daughter since she represented India in the online Olympiad in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“One of her ambitions was to play for India at the Olympiad. So playing at Samarkand makes her really happy,” says Baskar.