Skip to main content

The Queen's Gambit

By

I was looking for a championship chess set after watching the The Queen's Gambit.  Not that I was ever a great chess player, but I wanted to play again.  Of course, you can buy cheaper sets but it is something about the look and feel of the pieces that draws you to the quality sets.

My first chess set was a plastic set I got through my mother's S&H green stamps, inspired by Bobby Fischer winning the World Championship in 1972.  I was 11 at the time, and learned the game with this chess set.  My mother bought me a beginner's book, and we sat down together and went through the moves until I eventually figured most everything out.  I would play against classmates and usually get the upper hand, but it never went beyond that.  In time, I bought a Strato chess set but it was too difficult to remember that a piece occupied all three levels at once and I lost interest.  Other sports began to dominate my life and chess faded into the background.

I suppose some persons are born with a natural proclivity to the game - the so-called child prodigies.  Bobby Fischer was one, becoming a grandmaster at 15 after winning the US Championship the year before.  He rose to great heights when he beat Boris Spassky for the World Championship in 1972, and for a brief moment an American was the greatest chess player in the world.  This was at the height of the Cold War so it was viewed as a major victory, but for Fischer it was always personal, as it took him 15 more years to achieve this goal.  He was quite the primadonna, as he basked in the glory of this great win and refused to defend his title under any conditions other than his own.  He was eventually forced to relinquish the title in 1975, having failed to get Anotoly Karpov or any other grandmaster to play him under those conditions.  As a result, he is remembered mostly for his supreme arrogance.

Fischer didn't think much of women in chess.  Major tournaments were divided by gender and he never faced any aspiring women contenders for the title of grandmaster.  The most successful women's chess player at the time was Nona Gaprindashvili, but she didn't attain the title of grandmaster until 1978 when she finally had enough points accumulated from beating male counterparts to rise above woman grandmaster.

Judit Polgar followed in her footsteps achieving the title of grandmaster in the 1980s, and becoming the most successful woman of all time, thanks to her victories over Garry Kasparov and other men, which earned her a world ranking in the Top Ten.  Polgar has said that chess tournaments should be gender neutral.  Only in this way will women be able to achieve the same heights as their male counterparts.

What is nice about the movie is that Beth Harmon is not shown competing against other women but against men in open tournaments.  While not historically accurate, it helps reinforce Ms. Polgar's message.  Beth views it as a gender neutral game, surprised when people point out that she is a woman playing a man's game. 

Yet, the filmmakers are obsessed with Beth Harmon's sexuality.  It starts with having selected Anya Taylor-Joy for the title role, who looks great even when dressed in bargain basement clothes.  Her wardrobe improves dramatically upon winning tournaments across the country, turning her into a ravishing beauty by the time she first meets her Soviet nemesis Vasily Borgov in Mexico City.

The oddest thing about the film however is the use of dates to suggest these were real events.  Beth would have truly been unique at the time as no woman was offered the opportunity to play against the grandmasters, not even Ms. Gaprindashvili. 

Probably the closest equivalent to the character of Beth Harmon is Lisa Lane, the best American women's chess player in the 1960s, but she was never able to win on the international level and fell into obscurity after her brief brush with fame.  The filmmakers wanted Beth's success to mirror that of Bobby Fischer in overcoming the Soviet grandmasters during the Cold War.

Most grandmasters have commented favorably on the movie.  The only major gripe they have is Beth gaining some sort of advantage from the green pills she takes to create the hallucinations of a chess board on the ceiling, which allows her to envision the endless possible attacks and counterattacks.  They all say that drugs and alcohol very much work against you as a chess player.  You have to keep yourself as clean as possible.  However, Beth eventually overcomes her addiction to "librium" and alcohol to finally beat Borgov in the limited series' penultimate scene.

Grandmasters also note that most matches end in draws, but this would have been rather tedious to explain in the movie, so they show the players scoring decisive wins.  Nevertheless, all the games are modeled on actual games that were played at the international level, thanks in large part to consultants like Garry Kasparov working with the filmmakers.

It seems the immense worldwide popularity of the Netflix series will inspire a whole new generation of chess players, maybe even the first native-born American woman to compete on the international level, as to date the only American woman to achieve the title of grandmaster is Irina Krush, who was born in Odesa when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
229 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more