PANDEMIC SPARKS CHESS BOOM
Addition of The Queen's Gambit to prolonged lockdown creates `perfect storm' for the game
Selena Lucien was in control, locked in on the squares on her phone, her opponent in flight. Downstairs, her friend waited. They had agreed to go for a walk around Toronto. But Lucien was in the middle of a chess match.
“If I left my apartment and played while I walked, I would lose,” she said later, with a semi-embarrassed chuckle. “I couldn't risk it.”
Eight months ago, newly shut in, people around the world diverted their worries and experimented with new-found free time. Lucien is among the millions who learned, played and gradually became consumed by chess. Playing is therapy. Winning is a high.
“I know it sounds really nerdy,” she would say. “I feel it, and it makes me feel exhilarated.”
These feelings have only intensified after Netflix began streaming the series The Queen's Gambit. Set in the 1960s, the show's main character is an orphaned young woman named Beth Harmon, a chess prodigy who climbs the American and international circuits while battling personal trauma, self-doubt and addiction. Netflix said this week that 62 million households have watched the series since its Oct. 23 debut; the service said it is the most-watched show in dozens of countries.
The show has fuelled a chess renaissance that actually began in the spring. Since March, chess. com has added nearly 13 million new members, according to Nick Barton, the Platform's director of business development. More than 2.3 million of them have joined in the past month. An amateur chess tournament called Pogchamps became a sensation in June, drawing a combined 50 million viewers on gaming platform Twitch and becoming the most-watched chess event of all time.
“It's one of those perfect-storm moments” for chess, Barton said.
Last month, The Queen's Gambit pushed interest into overdrive. Chess sets are selling out, and last week an executive at a game company told NPR that October sales were up more than 1,000 per cent. Seth Makowsky, who uses chess to teach mental skills training to sports stars and celebrities, said interest in his program has skyrocketed and went so far as to call roll-up chess boards an unlikely fashion item.
“It's bigger than chess,” said Makowsky, whose clients include Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson, actress Cameron Diaz and the U.S. artistic swimming team. “It's an exciting moment for society in this way, because it's making smart cool.”
Lucien, a young attorney at Canadian law firm Borden Ladner Gervais, said she identified with the fictional Harmon for reasons beyond chess. After the character discovers her talents, she must quickly find her footing in an unfamiliar and male-dominated world. She does so tentatively at first, then confidently, bolstered by the support of mentors.
“She kind of walks in there,” Lucien said of Harmon, “led by the whim of her intellect and her love for something, and doesn't let these barriers get in her way. That's very empowering, especially in all these spaces where you feel like you don't want to stand out too much because you want to be included and not excluded. And she tells you that's OK.”
Lucien didn't play much chess growing up, though she and her younger sister, Irma, tinkered with the game. Early in the pandemic, Lucien downloaded the chess.com app and played casual games. The weeks turned to months, and each morning she found herself completing chess puzzles as she made coffee. She would sneak in a move or two during long-winded client calls. Eventually, like Harmon, Lucien began seeing the world almost through the prism of chess.
Chaotic and polarized as these months have been, Lucien said, the world seemed to make the most sense on these 64 squares.
“In life, it's very hard to transcend … boundaries. You come into a room, and there's all these assumptions on you. In chess, none of those things matter.”
Her opponents could come from anywhere in the world.
“They don't know that I'm a woman. They don't know what I look like,” she says.
What does matter is the way playing makes her feel: productive and accomplished. Recently she began playing chess online against her father and issued a few challenges to colleagues. This gave Lucien an idea.
Before the pandemic, her law firm played in a volleyball league against some of Toronto's other big firms. One of those, Stikeman Elliott, had a star player who was familiar to Lucien: her sister, Irma.
So Lucien proposed starting The Bay Street Chess League, imagining a showdown between the sisters and a chance at sweet revenge. It wouldn't exactly be a meeting of grandmasters, as in The Queen's Gambit. But after these past few months, as an uncertain winter approaches, Lucien liked the idea of a fun distraction and reason to hope.