The Queen’s Gambit & Chess: A Mirror Analysis

The Queen’s Gambit", the sensational TV-series had a huge hype over not only the chess lover people, but also the mass audience as well. There are many threads of discussions and arguments on whether “The Queen’s Gambit” is really making Chess famous or not. And here’s an effort from our side that dispels all the ambiguities regarding this.

Context:

“The Queen’s Gambit”, a groundbreaker TV series has been a sensation for quite a time. The fictional story was drawn from the 1983 coming-of-age novel of the same name by Walter Tevis. The series was the most watched show on Netflix in the United States in October 2020. Netflix reported on November 23, 2020 that the series has 62 million households watching it since its premiere, making it “Netflix’s biggest scripted limited series to date.” The show’s makers have done an excellent job of conveying and dramatizing the intense intensity of chess competitions, as well as the game’s often entirely obsessive nature. Let’s analyze and see how “The Queen’s Gambit” takes us into chess.

“The Queen’s Gambit” & Chess:

Here, we will march towards chess from “The Queen’s Gambit” perspective. The character Benny Watts approaches Beth Harmon, the show’s protagonist, at the commencement of the 1967 United States Chess Championship in the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit.” The venue is a modest auditorium on the Ohio University campus. Benny gestures around the venue and complains about the conditions, saying that the finest players in the country are competing, but the venue is second rate, the chess boards and pieces are cheap plastic, and the few spectators appear bored at best. The exchange between Beth (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Benny (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) reflects an insider’s knowledge of chess in the United States at the time the show is set, and is one of the many reasons why the series is one of the best and most successful screen adaptations of the game, a short list that includes the 2016 film “Queen of Katwe” and “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” from 1993.

The show’s makers have also done an excellent job of conveying and dramatizing the tremendous intensity of chess competitions, as well as the game’s often entirely obsessive nature. The scene in which Harry Beltik (Harry Melling) hauls a big box of chess books out of his car and starts distributing them to Beth in her living room, despite the fact that she has previously read most of them, has more than a grain of truth to it. And, like Beth and Benny, most skilled chess players have undoubtedly played at least a few games fully in their heads while traveling down a highway

Also, on a Different Note!

Despite the series’ efforts to make the chess scenes realistic, there are still moments where it falls short. The most obvious example is how quickly the players move during tournaments. Before a competition in Cincinnati, one tournament director tells Beth that each participant has two hours to make 40 moves, which was and still is a normal time limit for such games. However, Beth and her opponents make each of their moves after only a few seconds of thought in each battle. They’d finish their games in minutes, not hours, if they kept up this pace. It’s understood that the pace is necessary for filming because watching players sit at a board for hours, rarely moving, isn’t particularly exciting. It is, however, inaccurate.

Chess & “The Queen’s Gambit”:

It’s practically become a running jest among chess lovers to point out flaws in film depictions of the game over the years. For years, Dan Lucas, one of the top executives in the US Chess Federation, has kept an unofficial list. Boards that are oriented wrongly (there should always be a white square in the right corner), erroneous piece configurations (such as reversing the kings and queens on their starting squares), and characters that don’t know how to move and manage the pieces are among the most typical violations.

The creators of “The Queen’s Gambit” avoided those mistakes by working with two advisers, former world champion Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini, a well-known New York City chess tutor. (Pandolfini even appears as a Kentucky tournament director in a cameo appearance.) The actors were taught how to play and move pieces like professionals, which involves quick, almost machine-gun-like movements. Taylor-Joy created her own, more fluid approach based on her dance expertise, as she detailed in an interview with Chess Life magazine. She picks up the pieces and gently flips them over in the sequence.

The games depicted in the series are not only realistic, but also true to life, as they are based on actual competitions. The match in which Beth beats Harry for the Kentucky state title was played in Riga, Latvia, in 1955; the last speed chess game in which she beats Benny was played at the Paris Opera in 1858; and the series finale in which she faces Russian champion Vasily Borgov (Marcin Dorocinski) was played in Biel, Switzerland, in 1993.

Statistics Talks!

Statistics have shown an enormous rise in the number of players. On October 23rd, 2020, The Queen’s Gambit was launched in the United Kingdom. Here, the chess.com API was used to download players with the UK flag who joined within a four-month span before or after October 23rd to observe how this affects the amount of people that join online chess. The researcher chose 5000 UK players at random to save time (there are around 200,000 UK players, and querying each profile takes about 0.5 seconds). It’s worth mentioning that the accuracy with which a user’s flag reflects their nation of residency during the era following The Queen’s Gambit’s publication limits this technique.

There is a large and steady increase in the number of users joining chess.com after the release of The Queen’s Gambit in the United Kingdom (shown with a red dashed line). It appears that the surge in users signing up is still going strong.

Lastly:

The legends like World Chess Champion, Magnus Carlsen also talked about the sensational TV series. As a Netflix TV show, The Queen’s Gambit has gained international acclaim, with over 25 countries presently airing it. Here, I explain how the show’s release has resulted in an increase in online chess popularity, with both newcomers and established players inspired to return to online chess or play more frequently.

The Queen’s Gambit is igniting a worldwide chess craze that has attracted both new and experienced players. However, “The Queen’s Gambit” has its flaws. But, apart from some intricate errors, in the end, the series is a clear winner when it comes to the matter of the humongous surge of hype amongst both -the mass and the chess maniacs.

The world Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen’s verdict on The Queen’s Gambit: