“I do not like being bored,” Tanitoluwa “Tani” Adewumi wrote in his memoir, My Name Is Tani ... and I Believe in Miracles.
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.
This first chess championship victory in 2019 came less than two years after his arrival in the US. But that's only half the real story.
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 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. His parents supported their son's ambition to become a grandmaster by washing dishes and doing cleaning jobs. Then Tani won that famous victory at the New York State Championships and garnered national attention.
A fundraising website for the family raised more than $200,000 and an anonymous donor paid a full year's rent on a two-bedroom apartment for them.
Happily, the Adewumis were officially granted asylum in 2022, and Tani’s chess journey has only continued to skyrocket.