| Divya Deshmukh | |
|---|---|
 Deshmukh in 2024 | |
| Country | India |
| Born | 9 December 2005 [1] Nagpur, Maharashtra, India |
| Title | International Master (2023) Woman Grandmaster (2021) |
| FIDE rating | 2472 (August 2024) |
| Peak rating | 2472 (August 2024) [2] |
Divya Deshmukh (born 9 December 2005) is an Indian chess player who holds the title of International Master (IM). [3] [4] In June 2024, she won the FIDE World Junior Girls Chess Championship. [5]
Divya was born in Nagpur, Maharashtra. [6] Her parents, Jitendra Deshmukh and Namratha Deshmukh, are doctors. She completed her Class 12 board examinations. [7]
Divya became India's 21st woman chess Grandmaster in 2021. [6] She won the 2022 Women's Indian Chess Championship. She also won an individual bronze medal at the 2022 Chess Olympiad. She was also part of the gold medal-winning FIDE Online Chess Olympiad 2020 team. [8] [9] As of August 2024, she is the 4th ranked woman chess player in India. [10]
In 2023, in Almaty she won the Asian Women's Chess Championship. [11] She then finished first in the women's rapid section of the Tata Steel India Chess Tournament, despite being the bottom seed. At the tournament, she defeated Harika Dronavalli, Vantika Agrawal, Koneru Humpy, Savitha Shri B, Irina Krush, and Nino Batsiashvili, drew against Women's World Champion Ju Wenjun and Anna Ushenina, and suffered her only loss to Polina Shuvalova. [12]
In May 2024, Deshmukh was the Sharjah Challengers champion, a large open tournament win that earned her a spot in the Sharjah Masters the following year. [13] In June, she became 2024 FIDE World U20 Girls Chess Champion. She became the fourth Indian to win the World Junior Girls' title after Koneru Humpy in 2001, Dronavalli Harika in 2008, Soumya Swaminathan in 2009. [5] Needing a win in the final round, she defeated Bulgaria’s third seed Krasteva Beloslava in a five-hour marathon battle to secure 10 points out of a possible 11 and won the championship. [7]
Koneru Humpy is an Indian chess player best known for winning the FIDE Women's rapid chess championship in 2019. In 2002, she became the youngest woman ever to achieve the title of Grandmaster (GM) at the age of 15 years, 1 month, 27 days, beating Judit Polgár's previous record by three months. Humpy is the first Indian female grandmaster.
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The 2022–2023 edition of the FIDE Grand Prix was a series of four chess tournaments exclusively for women which determined two players to play in the Women's Candidates Tournament 2023–2024. The winner of the Candidates Tournament would play the reigning world champion in the next Women's World Chess Championship.
The women's event at the 44th Chess Olympiad was held from 29 July to 9 August 2022. It was contested by a record number of 162 teams, representing 160 nations. India, as host nation, fielded three teams. A total of 799 players participated in the women's event.
The Women's Chess World Cup 2023 was a 103-player single-elimination chess tournament, the second edition of the Women's Chess World Cup, taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 29 July to 22 August 2023. The runner up and third place finishers, Nurgyul Salimova and Anna Muzychuk, qualified for the Women's Candidates Tournament 2024. Since Aleksandra Goryachkina, the winner of the tournament, had already qualified through the Grand Prix, her replacement was Koneru Humpy, who was the highest-rated player on the January 2024 FIDE rating list who had played a minimum 30 games.
Divya Deshmukh scored her final WGM-norm in her first tournament in over 17 months at First Saturday GM October 2021.
