Chess finds itself between a rook and a hard place
My father – who is pretty good at chess – tried to teach me when I was a girl. I was uninterested. Flash forward 30 odd years to a few weeks ago, when a young man suggested we play. Suddenly, chess seemed fresh and exotic, and an opportunity to put one in the eye of boys who think girls can’t do it. After all, I am one of millions who had binge watched The Queen’s Gambit and found that it gave being good at chess a gleam equal parts feminist and sexy.
My chess journey has been engrossing and shocking: despite daily games with my father during my August sojourn at my parents’ house, I still get bogged down in complex eventualities that can never come to pass. I rewatched The Queen’s Gambit to see if I could pinch any moves – but was repaid by being trounced by a six-year old, himself a beginner.
Ah well. The show was still great the second time round, its extraordinary power stemming from its fictional prodigy being a girl – she starts at nine – and then a beautiful woman before whom the very best male players simply quiver and keel over.
If chess was male-dominated in the 1960s, when the series takes place, one might have assumed things had improved. Puzzlingly, they don’t seem to have much; mystifyingly, girls still play in their own tournaments.
Still, I watched with admiration last week as eight-year-old Maksym Kryshtafor, a Ukrainian refugee and chess champion who, with his mother, has been offered refuge for six months by one Paul Townsend, a chess enthusiast from York, trounce all his opponents in a tournament in Durham.
Mark Riding, the tournament organiser, compared the boy to Bobby Fisher: “What’s going on behind the eyes, it’s different from the rest of us,” he said. Disconcertingly, however, pictures of the event revealed a room full of boys and men, with nary a female in sight. Some may say there is something quintessentially male about chess’s appeal, and about the obsessional excellence that makes for mastery. I disagree. What is true is that girls are told they are less logical than their male counterparts. It’s just a question of when that tired and false canard finds itself checkmated.