The Queen’s Gambit is a 20 series based on the novel of the same name by Walter Tevis. Created by Scott Frank and Allan Scott for Netflix. It premiered on Netflix in 2020. The series quickly became the most streamed and most watched in the history of Netflix, with over 62 million viewers in the four weeks following its release.
What do chess players think of the movie? The opinion of Garry Kasparov, who was a consultant for this film, is that the protagonist bears resemblance to Bobby Fischer.
Benny, who’s a champion in America and helps the heroine in her tournaments, advises her and tells her about the secret of Soviet grandmasters’ success. That success is all thanks to teamwork. They can obviously play individually, but when they come together and brainstorm as a team, the game is quickly over. Benny says he’s an individualist so they don’t stand a chance against the robots. In the final chapters, the American team starts to use groups to help their girlfriend defeat them.
Garry Kasparov: “It is important to explain this to younger viewers, because today there is no such rudiment as adjourned games. In general, the very idea that a game can be postponed, analysed, it looks like some kind of wildness in the era of computers. But most of my world championship matches, with the exception of matches against Kramnik, were games that were adjourned. In the 1960s, that was standard practice. Benny is talking about the Russian players in chess who are able to dominate the game when they all coordinate. They are relatively unbeatable if they work together whereas individualism can be beaten by a coordinated team. Harmon’s story seems to mirror Fisher’s, but in this case, there is a complete departure from distrusting assistants. Harmon found it helpful to work with those who wanted to help her and sought to do so themselves. I really like how this episode in Moscow was presented. This moment in Russian chess brought players from around the world even closer, not to the Soviet Union or America, but to this kind of chess.”
This series is broadcast all over the world, and everyone can see how passionate about chess the Soviet people were. America is trying to catch up with Russia in a game of chess, with literally no mention of politics. At the time when Karpov won against Kasparov, there were many internal politics. First, the old and the new. So before the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had a match – when Karpov put up the Soviet flag and Kasparov assembled a Russian flag from some rags. It was already New Russia against Old USSR. The result of this is that they constantly saw political meanings in their matches- it was, after all, inside the country. And here are two different countries, and to say that there would be a special conflict between them is like night and day.
Garry Kasparov said: “In fact, this panic fear of Soviet chess players was really present, Fischer was the first to start defeating them and defeated everyone in turn very confidently, and eventually became the world champion. Tevis was thinking about this, too. He believed that passing down knowledge from generation to generation was partly due the fact that in the USSR there were many chess players who would get filtered out of their schools for being too bad at chess. However, the Matching Machine, an AI which identifies talents, has made it easy to find potential candidates. If America had a few chess enclaves and New York, Chicago, and the Soviet Union had millions of children playing in chess competitions, it’s not hard to imagine that new stars would emerge. The transfer of experience from generation to generation has always been a huge part of the Soviet Union (and Russia’s) success in chess. It was undoubtedly effective, but now the dynamics have changed since the collapse of the USSR and they are no longer dominant. The US team – both men and women – do very well. There are many strong chess players in America, who have won the top titles. If you look to the rest of the world there is a very strong community in China, both male & female. This has led to chess becoming an increasingly international game. But the spirit of the Soviet chess school is still alive. Bobby Fischer set a new bar for the type of play that demands professionalism and his contributions to the sport have stood the test of time.
That’s why this book and the movie definitively conveyed a sense of reverence for the accomplishments of their Soviet chess players, who were also in need of adopting this model. In this regard, Elizabeth Harmon is simply the prototype of Fisher, who learned a lot, received she got a lot from the Soviet chess players, but unlike Fischer – she still used the talent and abilities of American chess players.”
What is the role of tranquilizers in real chess life? (series one of the lines)
Garry Kasparov (on looking away from the board): “Playing not at the board but at the ceiling is not something unusual. I can list many leading chess players who often looked away and thought, so. I too could sometimes take my eyes off the board. These scenes, like the one she looks up at the ceiling in, are not only very well done but also appropriate considering how intense things have become in these parts. It’s true that alcohol is an addictive drug and certainly could be a obstacle to her ability to play chess. It’s also clear that adding drugs such as tranquilizers was not an option for her either. In general it can be said that addiction is a problem for chess players. This self-proclaimed addiction doubles down on the film’s uniqueness, since she is able to overcome these vices with chess and friends who play. I’m sorry, you are asking about something that I am not very familiar with. I do know that Andrei Arabov and Mikhail Tal had some problems with alcohol at some point. These two world champions were able to overcome alcoholism. There are a lot of players with this problem at a lower level, especially from the Soviet Union. Today this problem no longer exists because players no longer have enough energy to play more than one game per day. The workload they have before and during a game would be too much for one player.”
The TV series, which won 11 Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes and was nominated for 14 Primetime Emmys, was well loved by audiences.