Chess is a world of 64 squares, 32 pieces and two colors, where there are more possibilities than observable atoms in the universe.
The Queen’s Gambit is a chess opening where the white player sacrifices a pawn for compensation. It also happens to be the title of the 1983 novel and a new seven-episode miniseries. The Queen’s Gambit, the miniseries, was released by Netflix on October 23, 2020.
Upon release, the series ratings quickly soared, a rise to fame which can be attributed to a multitude of things: the truth of the characters, the fascinating story leading to the match, the depiction of Chess, the immersive cinematography by Steven Meizer, the utilization of the contrasting wide shots and close-ups, the care for detail by two-time Oscar-nominated director Scott Frank, and the incredible cast, especially 24-year-old breakout star Anya Joy Taylor who offers an award-deserving performance as Elizabeth Harmon.
Imagine this scene: Moscow during the Cold War. The air is tense as two players briskly arrive at the chessboard, each player readied for battle. One of these two players is from America, Beth Harmon, a young Kentuckian who was orphaned and learned to play chess at the “late” age of 8 — from a janitor, with the white pieces. The other is from Russia, a former prodigy, now the world chess champion, Vasily Borgov, with black pieces. His whole life has been bound by this world of 64 squares. Borgov plays with an unmatched technicality in the endgame; his opponent, Harmon, plays in a much more aggressive style.
In the match, Harmon surprisingly opens with “d4” — or Queen’s pawn — a move she seldom played in previous tournaments. She is traditionally an “e4” — or King’s pawn — player. After a series of moves in which Borgov moves his “d5” (his Queen’s pawn), Beth plays c4, sacrificing her pawn. The Queen’s Gambit is on the board. This game was a concluding moment in one of the major conflicts in the show, so let’s take a step back.
In the opening scenes of the series, Harmon’s mother commits suicide in a horrific car crash. Harmon is sent to an orphanage, where she picks up two things that will drastically change her life: substance abuse and chess. The series follows her through both these threads.
The series is adapted from the 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit by San Francisco native Walter Tevis.
Tevis’ life clearly informed his characters. The parallels between the author and Beth Harmon are uncanny: Both had incredibly rough childhoods in Kentucky, started using drugs given to them at their residential care institutions and later became dependent on drugs and alcohol.
The addiction: at the orphanage, Harmon and the other wards are given green tranquilizer pills by the staff to control them. The staff calls the pills “vitamins,” and allegedly does not know the side effects, which include hallucination. They give the children a pill twice a day, but due to their addictive nature and hallucinogenic quality, Harmon — along with others — starts stockpiling the pills to take by the handful at night.
An interesting but horrifying note is that Heath Ledger, the famous actor, had bought the rights to The Queen’s Gambit, planning to make his directorial debut with the project, but died from an overdose of benzodiazepines, the same addictive drug given to the children in the orphanage.
Tevis, like Harmon, had his first taste of addictive drugs when he was given them in an institutional setting — a convalescent home in San Francisco where his parents left him for a year when they moved to Kentucky.
The chess: Tevis and Harmon are also alike in their admiration for the game of chess. Harmon was a rather naughty young girl and a bored student. She often finishes her schoolwork quickly and is sent to the boiler room to clean erasers. There she encounters William Shiabel, the janitor, playing chess with another man. Harmon is immediately intrigued by the game; it is love at first sight.
On one of these trips to the boiler room, Harmon asks to join in and learn the game. After some resistance from Shiabel, who says, “girls don’t play chess,” Harmon begins playing, learning and eventually dominating Shiabel in play. It is clear she has talent. To follow her passion, she faces a hard road forward. During the 1950s it was taboo for women to be good at chess; their participation was discouraged. Even today, only two women, Hungarian grandmaster Judith Polgar (ranking 8th in the world in 2005) and current Chinese grandmaster Hou Yifan, have shattered the glass ceiling to gain spots on the top 100 players list.
Harmon begins learning chess “late” for a prodigy. For example, Gary Kasparov, often regarded as the best chess player of all-time, began playing chess at age six and was Soviet Grand Champion by 13. The Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, the current world chess champion (who was offered a cameo in the movie to get mated by Harmon), began playing chess at five, and among many other grandmasters regarded as Kasaprov’s competition for the best chess player of all-time.
Walter Tevis himself learned chess at seven and was a serious tournament player for some time at San Francisco’s Mechanics Institute, the oldest chess club in America. He continued to play and improve throughout his life.
To Beth Harmon, “chess is beautiful,” voicing Tevis’ passion for the game.
In the novel and in the miniseries, from Harmon’s first tournament, the Kentucky State Championship, to the final episode, the Moscow Invitational, Harmon fights both her opponent and her addiction. Sometimes her life, complicated by her substance-abusing adoptive mother, is too overwhelming. She often travels (Tevis also moved around a lot) and has no one to look up to or talk to except her new adoptive mother. Harmon’s adoptive mother does not intervene in Harmon’s substance abuse, encouraging her daughter’s fame, implying that everything is fine if Harmon continues to win and make money. Harmon’s mother dies of alcoholism in Mexico while Harmon is playing a tournament there.
The miniseries carefully constructs Harmon’s personal challenges. After her adoption, Harmon is taken to live in Lexington, Kentucky. There, she is seen as the weird introverted new kid and slighted by others. Even when she is acclaimed as a chess player, she has difficulty connecting with people of her age and gender. By 13, she is surrounded by the male-dominated, often older person’s world of chess.
Her character, both in the novel and in the miniseries, is never sentimentalized — the audience feels her struggles to be real. Perhaps Tevis’ character Beth Harmon seems so real because he creates her rooted in his own experiences.
Photo courtesy of @netflix on Instagram
William Tevis, the son of Walter Tevis, in an interview for this article, notes how his father’s writing was informed by his life, by both his darker struggles and brighter inspirations. The dark: Walter “was all his main characters, all of them were addicted.” The bright: William Tevis notes his father’s choice to make his protagonist a woman came from the influence of Walter’s “smart sister and daughter.”
Tevis describes chess as a way he bonded with his father, “We never got super serious, we played it like you might play Go Fish. Oftentimes, I would beat him [when I played against him and his friend at the same time] at speed chess, which I think pissed them off so they began to learn modern chess openings and began crushing me.”
Tevis mentions how much chess captivated his father and himself, “I was in high school and the Fischer versus Spassky World Chess Championship was huge.” Father and son were riveted by the play.
The match took place in 1972, during the Cold War.
The novel and the miniseries depicts a similarly momentous match in the Borgov versus Harmon game at the Moscow Invitational.
Harmon, like Fischer, is shown to be adored by the Russian people, who hold chess players in high regard.
While other nations like Russia and India celebrate and encourage their players, the lesser value placed on chess and its players suffered in the U.S. continues today. To survive through the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States Chess Federation needed to apply for government PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) funds, according to John Hartman, the editor of Chess Life. Maybe the Queen’s Gambit will begin to turn the tide.
Will Tevis admires his father’s work and says, “I really liked how even the bad guys were good…like how Borgov, after losing, applauds Beth.” Maybe Borgov’s applause is a nod of self-reflection for Walter Tevis, reassuring himself that his problems with alcohol and smoking do not define him; he is defined by other aspects of his life and work. Borgov’s applause is an obvious allusion to Spassky applauding Fischer after Game Six of the World Chess Championship match in 1972 (a game where Fischer played the Queen’s Gambit for the first time in his career).
Little things like Borgov’s applause, stemming from Tevis’ memories and introspection, bring his books to life. Tevis’ attention to details and subtleties in the novel is honored in the show. The portrayal of chess in The Queen’s Gambit is unlike the portrayal of chess in other shows or movies. The chess is real and great, even the characters in the background of tournaments are playing real games. In other TV shows and movies that feature chess, illegal moves, impossible positions are often seen. Netflix tasked Russian grandmaster and world champion Garry Kasparov and USCF national master Bruce Pandolfini, who had also worked with Tevis on the book, to create authentic games and scenes in the series.
Bruce Pandolfini is the architect of the chess behind The Queen’s Gambit book and miniseries. When first approached by Tevis, Pandolfini’s instant proposal for naming the book got him hired by the author.
In an interview for this article, Pandolfini describes himself as a once failed poet (many moons ago). He says chess saved his life: “I did not have a clear direction until when I picked it up at a library. I made multiple trips to get 32 books and fell in love with the aesthetic of the game.”
After some time, Pandolfini quit competitive play. In 1972, he was working at the Strand Bookstore in New York City when a man bought a substantial number of chess books. Pandolfini and the man talked for five minutes or so about chess. Days later, the man called Pandolfini. “The man was a producer for PBS,” Pandolfini said. “ He did not have an analyst for the Fischer Spassky match, so I was hired there on the spot.” That match was the same World Chess Championship that inspired Tevis.
Not only did Pandolfini play and commentate, but he also taught chess. “I have taught the most chess lessons of anyone on this planet,” Pandolfini claims. This statement checks out to be true.
The combination of his chess expertise and experiences, as well as his work on other films like Searching for Bobby Fischer, made him perfect for the role of executive chess consultant for Queen’s Gambit. Pandolfini’s responsibilities included working with the actors, advising the director and forming what he called the “Chess Bible” — 90 plus games that would be valuable to be shown on screen.
Pandolfini praised the collaboration on the show between Kasparov, John Paul Atkinson, Iepe Rubingh, inventor of chess boxing, and himself as “beautiful.” Pandolfini said, “We aimed for the most realism and this is the best chess ever in the media outside of a chess documentary. There were some small things about the clock but other than that it was what we wanted — to balance entertainment, the drama, and the chess.”
Pandolfini’s record is impressive; it warranted a cameo appearance in the series, which he jokes will not get him critical acclaim in the field of acting. He commends Taylor-Joy (who plays Harmon), who he describes as “amazing to work with and receptive and prepared. Don’t be surprised if she or the director win awards for the show.”
Pandolfini said that Walter Tevis was a “difficult, bright person and a clear teacher. He helped me improve my writing and teaching. I always wanted to help him with his chess.”
Pandolfini added, “Walter Tevis was a visionary — creating a character like Beth Harmon is a true symbol of female empowerment; [she is] almost like Chess Wonder Woman.”
Pandolfini believes that the timing of The Queen’s Gambit’s release was perfect, “Because we are in a pandemic, everyone can relate to the struggle of Beth, and how even through the darkest times, you can fight and do great things — just a great role model.”
One LWHS student inspired by the character of Beth Harmon and by The Queen’s Gambit is Coco Tao ’24. She says she always knew about the game but the show piqued her interest: “It was really satisfying to watch the players move the pieces. They were so good at the game.” Pandolfini stresses the importance of play and of losing and enjoying the game as keys to improve at chess. Tao also highlights the importance of playing for fun and often for chess improvement. She says she “started to bring the chess set to school, mostly lost but it’s still fun because I feel like I’ve found a new hobby.”
