Queen's Gambit breaks some barriers
Netflix show Queen's Gambit breaks some barriers, says Gordon Ritchie.
For centuries, the Queen has been recognized as the most powerful piece in chess, able to move any distance in any direction. The Queen's Gambit is one of the great chess openings, favoured by many world champions as the best way to exploit a slight advantage from the very beginning of the game.
It is now the title of a hit series from Netflix, based on a book by Walter Tevis, best known for The Hustler and The Color of Money, two previous books on high-stakes competition that became major motion pictures.
Tevis died in 1984 but his work lives on in The Queen's Gambit, the story of Beth Harmon, a troubled young woman who shows a remarkable gift for chess, which becomes her passport to success in her professional and personal life. With consummate skill, the series makes the drama of the great game accessible to the ordinary viewer while respecting the integrity of the game itself. Non-playing friends can't stop talking about this fascinating story, while chess players revel in the accuracy of the portrayal. (We are used to most movies and television representations of chess getting it hopelessly wrong but, in this case, the advice of chess grandmasters has ensured fidelity both in the mechanics of the moves and in the tense drama of high-level competition.) The result has been the beginning of a chess boom the likes of which has not been seen since the late, great Robert Fischer left the scene in disgrace.
Indeed, to some extent the character draws on the tragic life of the great “Bobby.”
Like Bobby, Beth is a true prodigy, a Mozart of the chessboard, for chess is one of only three fields (the other two are music and math) in which we see the phenomenon of the absurdly young person displaying impossibly profound gifts. Like Bobby, she has to make her own way as she goes up against the fearsome Soviet machine with its squads of grandmasters uniting to support their champion against all foes. And, like Bobby, she teeters on the cliff's edge between greatness and insanity. Sadly, Fischer fell over that edge: having won the world championship at the height of the Cold War in an extraordinary contest that remains the stuff of legend, he refused to defend his crown under the terms proposed and descended into raving madness (as other great champions had before him).
While Beth's story is based to some extent on Fischer's, there is one rather important difference: Beth is a girl who becomes a young woman. In Fischer's day, female chess players were regarded as an oxymoron: Bobby once proclaimed that he could beat any woman player at the handicap odds of a knight — as insulting as it was intended. There were a very few competent Russian female masters but none had ever reached the higher levels. Happily, times have changed but, sadly, not really that much.
No woman has ever contended for the World Championship and only one, Hungary's Judit Polgar (a remarkable story in her own right), has ever broken into the Top 10. Even today, top players such as my dear friend Nigel Short, himself a former prodigy who played for the World Championship in 1993, have gained notoriety by observing that women's brains are wired differently than men's.
Perhaps. But women are gaining ground rapidly at the international level, as more and more girls take up the game. In fact, two of the most promising up-and-comers hail from Ottawa. Over the past decade, two young women have taken their turn to dominate the city championship run by Ottawa's powerful RA Chess Club. Qiyu Zhou went on to win the Canadian Women's Chess Championship, becoming a women's grandmaster before heading off to study at university.
Her successor, and reigning Ottawa champion, is Svitlana Demchenko, who has a great future ahead of her, in chess or in any other field of her choosing.
Having been crushed in competition by both of these young ladies, I can attest that both are worthy champions. Unfortunately, it is still exceptional for women to be seen in the top echelons of the chess world. One can hope that the enthusiasms generated by the success of The Queen's Gambit will stimulate the champions of the future to take up the game and demonstrate, yet again, that the Queen is the most powerful piece in chess.