The Queen s Gambit, Aussie chess champion Heather Richards started playing the game at a young age.
And in a similar way to the show s heroine, she wasn t always popular with her opponents. I had three grown men cry when I beat them, Ms Richards told 9news.com.au. It kind of scared me. I was 10 or 11.
The Queen s Gambit has been popular on Netflix.(Netflix)
Ms Richards, 37, was 10 when her mother taught her to play the game, alongside her brothers, in the UK.
At her first tournament she was one of only two girls.
She lost, she recalls, but after her mother bought her a book on chess, something clicked - and she started to win.
The Queen s Gambit/Netflix
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The Queen’s Gambit, female players have struggled to climb to the top of the real-life chess world. Just 37 of the more than 1,600 international chess grandmasters are women. The current top-rated female, Hou Yifan, is ranked 89th in the world, while the reigning women’s world champion Ju Wenjun is 404th.
Why? There are certainly fewerfemale chess players to begin with, but it appearsunlikely participation can explain the whole story.
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Sylvia. Conductor: Kevin Rhodes, choreography: Manuel Legris after Louis Mérante. With Kiyoka Hashimoto, Masayu Kimoto, and Davide Dato. Production from November 2018. Register for free and view here.
2 pm ET: VOCES8 Live from London presents
Why Top-Level Chess is Still a Boys Club
There are certainly fewerfemale chess players to begin with, but it appearsunlikely participation can explain the whole story.
Unlike the wildly popular Netflix chess-themed series The Queen’s Gambit, female players have struggled to climb to the top of the real-life chess world. Just 37 of the more than 1,600 international chess grandmasters are women. The current top-rated female, Hou Yifan, is ranked 89th in the world, while the reigning women’s world champion Ju Wenjun is 404th.
Why? There are certainly fewerfemale chess players to begin with, but it appearsunlikely participation can explain the whole story.
Why the gender gap in top-level chess?
Queens are powerful, but it’s downhill after that.
Unlike the wildly popular Netflix chess-themed series
The Queen’s Gambit, female players have struggled to climb to the top of the real-life chess world. Just 37 of the more than 1,600 international chess grandmasters are women. The current top-rated female, Hou Yifan, is ranked 89th in the world, while the reigning women’s world champion Ju Wenjun is 404th.
Why? There are certainly fewerfemale chess players to begin with, but it appearsunlikely participation can explain the whole story.
The argument about chess’s gender gap often follows the classic nature-versus-nurture debate. On one side are those who believe men are “hardwired” to play chess, such as former World Championship challenger Nigel Short.