“I do not like being bored,” Tanitoluwa “Tani” Adewumi wrote in his memoir, My Name Is Tani … and I Believe in Miracles. We can tell: At 8 years old, he won a New York state chess championship’s K-3 division after only learning how to play a year prior, thanks to the hours he spent studying the intricacies of the game and his ability to think 20 moves ahead on the board.
At age 10, he won the under 12 section at the North American Youth Championships and became a National Master, securing an International Chess Federation FIDE Master title just a few months later. And at 13, the child prodigy won the 2024 U.S. Cadet Championship, a round-robin tournament that invites the top eight Americans under 16 years old to compete.
Tani’s skills are beyond impressive. But there’s a whole other level of inspiration to his story, which has been picked up by major news outlets, turned into the aforementioned book and a children’s book called Tani’s New Home: A Refugee Finds Hope and Kindness in America, and acquired to be made into a movie by Paramount Pictures. After his family was threatened by terrorist group Boko Haram while living in Nigeria, they fled to the U.S. in 2017. When Tani won that first state championship, he and his family were still living in a homeless shelter in New York.
Thankfully, the Adewumis were officially granted asylum in 2022 and now live in the New York City area, where Tani’s chess journey has only continued to skyrocket. Last weekend, he participated in the 2025 BlitzFuel GM/IM Invitational in Midtown, competing against players from all over the world.
He went into it with one goal in mind: securing a grandmaster norm, attainable through an exceptional performance against skilled opposing players in a chess tournament. Once a player has earned three grandmaster norms, they’re well on their way to becoming a grandmaster: the highest-ranking title awarded by the International Chess Federation, and one qualifying players hold onto for life.
Tani first needs to become an International Master, which he says he’s close to achieving. And in the BlitzFuel Invitational, he landed in fourth place in group GM B after playing against nine adept opponents, including grandmasters Oliver Barbosa and Dambasuren Batsuren.
But even for someone as accomplished and experienced as Tani, matches can get tough — like when he’s confident in a calculation, only to miss the move and feel like he wasted time. “Now that’s when you start getting into your head,” he told Nice News, noting: “I’d say overcoming that is pretty annoying. Because you just spent this amount of time, this amount of effort, and it just turned up to nothing.”
Part of what makes Tani such a standout, however, is how the young chess master gets himself back on track. “I just try to start the game fresh and just be like, ‘OK, I have a new position, OK, I’ll just figure out what to do now,’” he said, adding: “I mean, even now I’m still working on that, because it’s still really tough. But I’m trying to just get my mind back into the game when that happens.”
And focus doesn’t seem to be something Tani lacks. The 14-year-old competes in mini tournaments throughout the year in addition to the more prestigious ones, “to get warmed up a little bit.” He also spends up to 10 hours per day practicing chess on the weekends, and about three hours each weekday — all while attending classes full-time as a high school freshman.
As for how he stays in the right headspace with a tournament looming in the near future? “I probably take some deep breaths and that’s it mostly,” he said, acknowledging that he sometimes does get nervous but noting matter-of-factly, “I feel like that just happens and it’s just part of life.”
Tani’s strategy for increasing his skill level is simple, but effective: He maintains the same routine, whether or not he has a tournament on the docket. It includes lessons and practicing puzzles, openings, and calculations — the latter of which, Tani says, is “just being able to calculate or think and being able to play out moves in your head with great accuracy and of good speed.”
In his book, which was published in 2020, a young Tani muses over two possible ideas regarding what he wants to be when he grows up. “I think I’m going to live to be more than one hundred,” he wrote. “So maybe I’ll do both — be a grand master and a pilot. I’d like that.”
Fast forward to 2025, and not only has Tani maintained his love for the game of chess, but his vision for the future has sharpened. “For now, I want to just get grandmaster. I’ll figure out the rest when I get older, and higher into grades,” he said, adding: “That’s the main focus for right now.”
RELATED: Meet Jonah: The 15-Year-Old Crocheting Prodigy Who Donates His Profits to Ethiopian Kids in Need
Share to:
