🇺🇸 Keya Jha

The flag that fell at move 42

The 5th Joe Yun Memorial in Akron, Ohio, was an ordinary weekend tournament until its final round. On August 10, 2025, Keya Jha — ten years, nine months and two days old — sat down with the black pieces against grandmaster Bryan Smith, 45, rated 2449 by US Chess. She had reached the last round with 3½ points from four: a half-point bye, then three straight wins.

For long stretches the game was not hers. Smith built pressure in a slow, maneuvering middlegame; the queens came off on move 15, and US Chess later described Keya as having “a difficult position to defend,” with Smith “on the precipice of breaking through.” Then, at move 42, Smith’s flag fell while he was away from the board. The result was final. Keya won the tournament outright with 4½ points from 5, half a point clear of Smith and Dalton Perrine.

A flyer from the wrong year

The explanation, which Smith gave with unusual candor, was a clerical mistake. He was playing the tournament’s two-day schedule and had checked the time control on a flyer he had printed — from the 2024 edition. He expected 30 extra minutes after move 40. The 2025 rules gave 90 minutes for the whole game plus 30 seconds a move. “Tragically, I had printed out the flyer from the previous year,” he explained in comments published with the annotated game.

“It was completely devastating to lose on time in such an easily winning position,” he told Chess.com. He said the loss cost him more than $1,200 in prize money and that he drove seven hours home “in a state of total despair.” On the other side of the board, the winner was not sure what had happened. Keya “had to cross-check with the tournament director twice about whether she had really won,” her father, Ayoosh Jha, told Chess.com. “She was happy and relieved.”

Breaking Carissa Yip’s record — on the same day as Bodhana

Since August 30, 2014, the American record had belonged to Carissa Yip, who beat grandmaster Alexander Ivanov at the New England Open aged ten years, eleven months and twenty days. Yip went on to become the youngest female National Master in U.S. history and an International Master. Her mark stood for eleven years. Keya beat it by two months and eighteen days.

She did not set a world record, whatever some local television reports said. Hours earlier that day, at the British Championship in Liverpool, England’s Bodhana Sivanandan had beaten grandmaster Peter Wells at ten years, five months and three days — the youngest girl anywhere to beat a grandmaster in a rated classical game. US Chess ran both results under a single headline: two girls had broken Yip’s record in one weekend. The accurate description of Keya’s feat is the one US Chess and Chess.com use: the youngest American girl to defeat a grandmaster in a FIDE-rated classical game.

She learned by watching her father

Keya was born in 2014 — in California, according to Chess.com — and grew up in central Ohio. She learned the game at four and a half by sitting beside her father while he played online. “She picked up some of the rules when she saw me playing online and got intrigued by how the pieces moved,” Ayoosh Jha said. “She sat next to me every day, and I taught her all the other rules.”

She began playing tournaments at seven, during the pandemic. Her first FIDE rating, 1652, appeared in August 2024. That September she began training with grandmaster Dmitry Gordievsky, and she also works with coach Jeffrey Barnett. She played the Susan Polgar Foundation Girls’ Invitational in 2024 and again in 2025.

Chess, taekwondo and table tennis

Chess is not her only competitive outlet. She holds a black belt in taekwondo from the American Taekwondo Association and plays competitive table tennis, where Chess.com described her as one of the top-ranked players in Ohio. At ten she was in seventh grade, having skipped two grades, and studying advanced math.

Asked what she likes about chess, she gave an answer many grandmasters would sign: “Kind of like how it exercises your brain a lot. Plus, it’s always fun to win a game and do puzzles.” Asked whether she had been nervous against Smith, she was matter-of-fact: “I wasn’t too scared because someone with my rating had been able to beat him just a few years ago so I was a bit confident.”

The rating after the record

The win lifted her US Chess rating to 2179, a personal best and 21 points short of the National Master title. On the international list her FIDE rating jumped 112 points in a single month, from 1823 to 1935 in September 2025, and peaked at 1936 that December.

In September 2025, NBC4 reported that she was aiming to become a National Master soon and, maybe one day, a grandmaster. The second is a steep climb. The grandmaster title requires a 2500 rating plus norms earned against elite fields; about 2,000 players have ever been awarded it, and only 44 of them are women.

Where is Keya Jha now?

As of September 2026 Keya is eleven and still competing. She is still competing in FIDE-rated events. Her September 2026 ratings are 1906 in standard chess, 1884 in rapid and 1788 in blitz, which place her around 1,300th among active players in the United States. She does not yet hold a FIDE title, and her current US Chess rating could not be verified for this page.