Menlo Park brothers are chess champs

Shawnak Shivakumar, the Laurel School student who in 2016 won the California state chess championship for third-graders, placed second recently in the national chess championships for fourth-graders.

This year, Shawnak’s brother, 5-year-old Sahil, also competed in the U.S. Chess Federation tournament, held Dec. 8-10 in Orlando, Florida. He came in eighth among kindergartners.

Shawnak, who is 9, won five out of seven games with draws in the remaining two games. He will go on to play in the PanAmerican championships in Chile and the world championships in Spain in 2018.

Sahil won five of seven games and lost two.

Both boys tied for second places in their grade level in the state tournament on Dec. 3 to win a place in the national tournament.

Last year Shawnak told the Almanac that his goal was to increase the number of points he earned in tournament play to 1,900 from the 1,686 he then had. He’s surpassed that goal. After the national tournament, he had 1,996 points. A point total above 2,000 ranks a chess player as a U.S. Chess Federation expert.

The tournament had 1,800 competitors; more than 200 competed at the fourth-grade level.

The Shivakumar brothers and their parents, Devleena and Shiva, celebrated their victories at Disneyworld before returning to Menlo Park, where they live in the Willows neighborhood.