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The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix is a master of two things: chess and winged eyeliner. If you have enough YouTube tutorials to help you with the latter but the former has you wanting more information, let’s get into the chess of it all. Tragically,
The Queen’s Gambit is not based on a true story or a real female prodigy. We can stan Beth Harmon and her rock-and-roll approach to a (historically) geeky game all we want, but we’re stanning a fictional character. Womp, womp. CHARLIE GRAY/NETFLIXNetflix
The Queen’s Gambit, by Walter Tevis.
According to a 1983 interview with the
Why women lose at chess
GM Koneru Humpy and Chinese GM Ju Wenjun at the 2019 Skolkovo Women Grand Prix. Photo: David Llada/Fide
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When she first started participating in chess tournaments at age 7, Koneru Humpy would play in both draws of boys and girls. “They considered girls as ‘underdog players’, so I was allowed to participate, she recalls. “But mostly girls themselves didn’t dare do that because the competition (in the boys’ draw) was very tough.
Humpy was no underdog. In 1999 and 2000, she won the Asian under-12 and national under-14 titles at ages 12 and 13, respectively, both in the boys’ category. Her performance against girls was even better: She swept up the top prize at the under 10, 12, 14 and 20 world championships. At the age of 15, she became a chess grandmaster (GM), the youngest woman in the world at the time to enter the elite club. She even broke the record of Judit Polgár, the highest rated woman chess p
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The Chess Informant
Once upon a time, there were no computer engines to analyze a chess game. And there was no database to provide millions of games at a touch of a button.
However, games
were available, albeit not in a number of millions; but the most current ones, the most important and the most beautiful ones were made available to look and delight at. Not at a touch of a button, but by patiently turning page by page of a printed book of usually not less than 300 pages, containing not less than 200 games. The pleasure had to be eagerly awaited for a couple of months at a time.
“It’s an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it; I can dominate it – and it’s predictable.” In the Netflix miniseries, The Queen’s Gambit, these are the words that chess prodigy Beth Harmon uses to describe her passion for the game, but I suspect that they also tell us something about the runaway success of this series in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The seven-episode series was viewed worldwide by more than 62 million people in its first month, making it the most-watched “limited scripted series” on Netflix. The show is visually compelling: 1960s fashion is one aspect of this, but perhaps the key features are the pace and aspirational tone of the narrative – a young girl/woman, orphaned and facing coming-of-age issues, while striving for the summit in the male-dominated realm of chess.