Regular visitors to this site may find it puzzling that I would have watched this miniseries.  After all, I am on record as a chess detractor.  It was only a few months ago that I mentioned that the movie Knives Out felt like it had been written specifically for me in part because two of the main characters play not chess but go.  I am far from a great go player⁠—still only a two kyu after more than a quarter of a century of playing⁠—but I have still been enough of a go advocate to have given Echo Mockery a little speech about how it’s better than chess.  My own speech has gone something like this:

• Go is less arbitrary than chess.  Chess has six different types of pieces which move in different ways; go just has one type of piece, the stone, and it doesn’t move at all.  Chess also has an arbitrary starting position; go starts with a blank board and an extremely simple rule set, from which a staggering amount of depth emerges.

• Go allows players to make more progress before heavy memorization comes into play.  Obviously, professional go players have to do a lot of studying, and even intermediate players should know some of the common patterns⁠—“joseki”, they’re called.  And, yes, there are books on open­ing theory in go; I own some.  But there’s no real equivalent to the encyclopedia of set chess openings, where players just follow the book moves for twenty or thirty turns and the first one to deviate probably loses.

• Go makes it very easy for players of significantly different strengths to play a fun, competitive game, through the use of handicap stones.  Chess has no real equivalent⁠—you could take away one of the stronger player’s rooks or some­thing, but there are no standardized provisions for that.  Whereas if I play a six kyu, I know that I’ll be playing white and that the player with the black stones will start with four extra stones at the corner hoshi points.

• Chess is destructive; go is constructive.  In go, even if you lose badly, you’ll have at least a small territory to show for your efforts.

And yet I suppose that, if I’m going to write about The Queen’s Gambit, I have to confess that over the past three years I have probably played at least five times as many chess games as go games.  How did that happen?

My father taught me how to play chess when I was… four, I think?  Though, to show just how arbitrary the rules of chess are, he didn’t even have the starting positions of the pieces correct.  Every chess game I played in the 1970s began with the bishops next to the rooks.  He brought me back a small magnetic chess set from one of his trips to Asia in the early ’80s, but when I played other kids, I discovered that I still didn’t know all the rules.  The first time one of my opponents castled, I was dumb­founded.  Doubly so the first time I saw someone promote a pawn.  That was in junior high.  I don’t think I played at all in high school.

My first year of college, though, I was browsing in Cody’s Books as I was wont to do, and I happened across the games section, and, I dunno, the chess books just looked cool to me.  I felt like, all right, I’m here to become an intellectual, and intellectuals are supposed to be good at chess, right?  So, somewhat arbitrarily, I picked up a book called Weapons of Chess by Bruce Pandolfini, of whom I hadn’t heard but who turned out to be a big enough name in the chess world that a few years later I saw Ben Kingsley playing him in a movie.  (He was also a consultant both on this miniseries and on the novel that served as its source material!)  That book covered some elementary tactics⁠—pins, skewers, forks⁠—that had completely eluded me in junior high.  The other book I picked up, hot off the presses, was Play Winning Chess by Yasser Seirawan, billed on the cover as “the U.S.A.’s #1-Ranked Chess Player”; this book was published by, of all outfits, Micro­soft Press.  But the web hadn’t been invented yet, and the one guy in the dorms who was willing to play me taunted me after winning our first game, so that was enough live play for me.  What little chess acumen I developed went into playing Battle Chess, and once I’d seen all the animations, I lost interest.

I might have randomly decided to try playing chess online once the web became a thing, but in 1997 reigning world champion Garry Kasparov lost to an IBM RS/6000 Workstation called Deep Blue.  At the time I was running a news blog (though I didn’t call it that, as the word “blog” had yet to be coined), and in covering this story, I found a lot of discussion of how computers may have surpassed humans in chess, but go was so much deeper that even an intermediate player could beat the best go programs.  This was intriguing to me, so I pulled up some pages about go, and found it much more appealing than chess for the reasons listed above.  I bought a bunch of books, got an account on the Internet Go Server, and improved from thirty kyu to eighteen kyu over the course of a few weeks.  (Eighteen kyu is still terrible, mind you.)  I was in grad school in North Carolina at the time, and I discov­ered that there was a live go club that met at a tea house called Silk Road in Chapel Hill; at the time, Silk Road had a cook who offered up a small selection of dishes from across Asia, never the same from one night to the next, and these were delicious⁠—I still think about the “lubia aur mukhbi” I got there one evening.  After I left grad school, my interest in go waxed and waned.  Some years I’d play online every day.  Some years I wouldn’t play at all.  But I never played chess even once.

At the beginning of 2022, it occurred to me that perhaps I could get off the two kyu plateau by watching some instructional videos.  I popped some appropriate search terms into Youtube and soon I was watching go games with commentary by Michael Redmond, the only player from outside Asia ever to reach nine dan.  But the Youtube algorithm decided that if I was interested in go videos, then surely I must be interested in chess videos as well, and started filling my recommendations feed with them.  I ignored these.  For a while.  But then I it fed me a video whose thumbnail was not a picture of someone making a wacky reac­tion face but a simple line of text: “Chess, but if your pawn can move, it has to.”  That seemed oddly intriguing.  I clicked on it.  Here, you can too:

This turned out to be one of many videos by “Chess Simp”, a Vietnamese chess player who took on a challenge like this almost every day, then presented the resulting games with amusing commentary delivered by a text-to-speech program.  The oppo­nent opens his queen up to a capture?  “That blunders a woman.”  The opponent has his king start charging up the board?  “Testos­terone!”  I wound up plowing through a bunch of these videos.  Of course, once I’d done that, the floodgates opened, because if watching half a dozen go videos triggered a bunch of recommen­dations for chess videos, imagine what watching half a dozen chess videos might trigger.  And, semi-randomly, I did wind up clicking on one of the “wacky reaction face” videos.  This was by an account called “Gotham Chess”, run by an international mas­ter named Levy Rozman.  Levy Rozman is now the best-known chess teacher in the world, and as of this writing his channel has five and a half million subscribers.  The video I watched made it easy to see why.  Yes, it was funny, but the comedy was secon­dary to the way that Rozman made the strategic considerations involved in each move crystal clear even to a layperson like me.  And not just crystal clear, but interesting; I might have watched the Chess Simp videos without ever playing again myself, but after watching the Gotham video, I hopped over to chess.com, got an account, played some bots, and then took the plunge into playing human opponents.  One thing that encouraged me was that I’d dreaded the prospect of having to memorize all those openings, but as I watched more videos, it became clear that, as a beginner, you don’t have to⁠—you pick one or two to learn for each side.  One video I happened across, by someone in India whose name I forget, suggested that since 99% of beginners play e4 or d4 as their first move with the white pieces, you can throw off your opponents by learning a more eccentric opening; I therefore tried out the English opening, c4, and discovered that, quite apart from the way it disoriented other novices, I liked it a lot more than the e4 and d4 openings I’d tried.  With the black pieces, I play the Caro-Kann against e4, and the King’s Indian against everything else.  I really like the Caro-Kann, particularly the Botvinnik-Carls line; the King’s Indian still hasn’t really clicked for me in the same way, so watching white play d4 does make me grit my teeth a bit.  Anyway, I wondered whether hav­ing played a few thousand go games might make chess easier for me to pick up than it’d been thirty years earlier, and it turned out that the answer was probably yes⁠—within a few weeks, with no more “studying” than watching a handful of Youtube videos, I’d worked my Elo rating up into the 1500s, which put me in the 97th percentile.  Of course, the chess.com database includes millions of accounts belonging to people who played two games and then quit forever, but still, online chatter suggested that cracking 1500 or even 1400 put me solidly into the intermediate range.

However, I no longer have an account on chess.com.  One of the tips I had happened across early on was to start by playing slow games and analyze them afterward⁠—playing blitz was no way to improve, the posters contended.  So I told myself that I’d play one game a day, on settings that would keep me from feeling any time pressure⁠—initially with an hour on the clock, then with half an hour.  But even the latter generally meant an hour out of my day, and if I lost, the rating drop would gnaw at me until I had a chance to play again.  The site also had reward systems in place just for racking up wins quickly⁠—wood level, stone level, bronze level, etc.⁠—so I did start playing a lot of blitz games, not to get better at the game, but just to ascend this particular ladder.  Eventually it all became enough of a time sink that I had to quit.  I do still play, but anonymously on Lichess, with no rating trackers.

Even that’s probably a bad idea.  In theory, I spend most of my free time working on one project or another.  But say I’m writing a paragraph, and I don’t know what the next sentence is.  I’m probably not going to get it by brute force, i.e., by just staring at my screen and waiting for the words to assemble themselves.  So I think, okay, let me do something else and let that sentence cook in the background.  But I don’t want to just flat-out waste time watching cat videos or whatever.  I mean, I do watch the cat videos sometimes.  But more often I will think that, while I’m mulling over how that next sentence might go, I should get some mental exercise.  And often I will click over to Lichess.  Now, of course, that trick never works: playing the game takes up my full attention, and while it’s going the sentence is completely forgot­ten.  That’s actually another of the differences between chess and go.  For me, go is… I don’t want to say “meditative”, because I can’t meditate, but if I’m watching a news report or something, I will often play a go bot in another window to keep the distrac­tible part of my mind occupied.  But I cannot do that by playing a chess bot, much less a human opponent.  If chess is happening it’s a foreground activity, never background.  And as a foreground activity, it leaves a lot to be desired, because most of my com­plaints about chess remain!  Playing it is often more frustrating than fun, especially when the opponent plays positional chess, steadily grinding away options until I may not be down in mate­rial but there just aren’t any moves I want to make.  It’s like the opposite of the old Civilization mantra: instead of “just one more turn”, it’s “please, not another turn”, and there have been times that I’ve just resigned, like paying the check and leaving a restaurant because the music is irritating.  So I went into The Queen’s Gambit feeling ambivalent about chess.  But it was a much more informed ambivalence than it would have been in 2020.

Even though I watched this show because I remembered it being a hit and because I’ve played a lot of chess over the past three years, I soon discovered that there was another reason why I should have put it on my list even had neither of those things been the case: all seven episodes were written and directed by Scott Frank, the screenwriter behind Little Man Tate, a movie I watched six times in the theaters back around the time I was working my way through Weapons of Chess.  That was the story of a child prodigy being raised by a working-class mother with­out much in the way of education, a premise that hit close to home.  So here we have another prodigy, a girl this time, whose father, like Fred Tate’s, is listed on her birth certificate as un­known, but her mother is a mathematician with an Ivy League pedigree⁠—which would make her a trailblazer even today, but all the more so as we’re in the 1950s.  However, her mother is also psychologically unbalanced and suicidal, and leaves her daugh­ter, Beth, orphaned at the age of eight.  Beth winds up in a Ken­tucky orphanage that dopes up the girls with tranquilizers, which Beth, at the suggestion of a rebellious friend, stores under her tongue so she can take a few large doses instead of a con­stant stream of small ones.  Later, after she starts sneaking out of class so the janitor can teach her chess in the basement, she dis­covers that if she takes a mouthful of the pills at night, the sha­dows on the ceiling will resolve into a chessboard, and she can watch the pieces play out thousands of patterns for her to ab­sorb.  Before long she is visiting the high school, playing every­one in the chess club simultaneously and defeating them effort­lessly.  At fifteen she is adopted, and though her adoptive father abandons the family shortly thereafter, Beth demonstrates to her adoptive mother that by winning chess tournaments, she can make enough money to keep the household financially solvent.  Beating her opponents isn’t much of an obstacle, though the U.S. champion⁠—a young guy who dresses like a cowboy⁠—does deal her her first defeat, and she runs into a wall every time she finds herself pitted against the impassive Soviet champion, whose flawless, methodical style proves impervious to her shock-and-awe approach.  The real danger is that she’ll implode in one way or another.  Her reliance on downers is already a concern, so it doesn’t bode well when she adds a drinking problem to the mix.  From what I’ve read, the book this series is based on was a “write what you know” project for the author: not that he was a grandmaster⁠—he seems to have played at around my level⁠—but he was an alcoholic who’d spent a big chunk of his childhood on phenobarbitol, so the substance abuse was the real heart of the story.  For his part, Scott Frank explained that he was explicitly trying to revisit the themes of Little Man Tate now that he had thirty years’ more life experience and thus had a better idea of what he wanted to say, so to him, The Queen’s Gambit was about “the cost of genius”.  What it is pretty clearly not about is chess.

I make a fair chunk of my income these days teaching AP U.S. History.  One interesting thing about the AP U.S. History exam is that students are not tested on wars.  They’re certainly expected to understand the factors that led to each war, and how the country changed in the aftermath of each war, and even how people on the homefront might have felt about the wars as they were raging, but things like military strategy and individual battles are more or less skipped over.  Classes really do spend a month leading up to the Civil War, and then the next week, it’s, “So the Civil War happened. The North won! And now this week we’re going to talk about Reconstruction.”  That is pretty much the approach The Queen’s Gambit takes toward chess.  Once Beth starts playing professionally, her life is organized around the tournament schedule, but once the tournaments start, what do we see?  Beth plays her first move, and we cut to a crowd congratulating her on her victory.  Or maybe we spend a minute looking at her steely-eyed stare and her opponent’s quivering lip, interspersed with close shots of hands moving pieces in unintel­ligible ways.  Oh, we made sure that all the games were real, the creators said in their promotional appearances, and if you pause on a frame that happens to show a full chessboard, you’ll see that the positions make sense!  But who cares, if we’re not al­lowed to follow the games?  In interviews, Scott Frank talked about how he and his collaborators focused on the characters’ reactions rather than the chessboard action because they had to cater to an audience than didn’t know anything about chess.  But, in the parlance of our times, that sounds to me like a skill issue.  Levy Rozman has demonstrated that it is absolutely possible to make a chess game understandable and interesting to someone who doesn’t already know the game.  If he can do it, why couldn’t Scott Frank?  “That would’ve been hard, so we just didn’t do it” is a pretty sad choice.  Git gud.

I was also disappointed that The Queen’s Gambit was so formu­laic.  Yes, formulas become formulas for a reason, so, sure, there were moments I found touching.  But an algorithm could have written this.  The setbacks come exactly where the screenwriting manuals say.  The finale lines up the callbacks to characters from Beth’s past just as the producers of This Is Your Life would have done it.  I kept waiting for some sort of respite from the narrative assembly line, but none was forthcoming.  The one surprise I can think of came when a predictable story beat I didn’t want to see was missing.  For a moment there it looked like Beth was going to visit the high school for the first time while going through with­drawal from her pills, and she’d do poorly and no one would be­lieve she was really a prodigy⁠—but her one friend at the orphan­age hooks her up, so crisis averted.  (That friend returns at the end to help her clean up her act before her final showdown with the Soviet champion, which turns out to be super easy, barely an inconvenience⁠—it’s the approach David Michelinie and Bob Lay­ton took to Tony Stark’s alcoholism, where after a stern talking-to and a montage page he’s all better, rather than the Denny O’Neil version that sent him on a three-year journey to rock bottom and back.)  I suppose another set of story beats that are surprising by their absence are those in which Beth encounters any kind of sexism or animosity.  The Queen’s Gambit takes place in a version of the 1960s in which a young woman encoun­ters success in what had previously been a man’s world, and all the men in that world think it’s pretty neat.  One of the weak­nesses of the story is that pretty much the only thing Beth has going for her is that it is indeed neat to see a girl demolishing the boys⁠—that, and some sympathy for the hard knocks life has dealt her.  But as a person she’s not particularly likeable.  She actually sticks out in that regard, because with a few exceptions like her adoptive father and the martinets at the orphanage, almost everyone else is!  Virtually everyone she meets in the chess world is kind to her.  Her first opponent, Annette Packer, patiently explains to her how chess clocks work, leaps to the rescue when Beth has a menstrual emergency, and comes back when Beth is at her lowest to thank her for being an inspiration.  The guys who seem like they’re going to be jerks become her coaches, providing insights that prove crucial in Beth’s quest to defeat the Soviet champion.  And even he proves to have a warm heart beneath the impassive exterior!  Yet Beth doesn’t recipro­cate the generous support she receives from those around her⁠—she just converts it into chess excellence.  If this were a story about a musician, I suppose the idea would be that the music she gives the world adds more value to it than a few acts of kindness would, and if you consider a brilliant chess game to be a work of art, then the calculus is pretty similar.  But The Queen’s Gambit seems unaware that it’s presenting a story of someone who takes and takes and takes and only gives back Qxe7+.

Where The Queen’s Gambit does excel is in its mise-en-scène.  It won the Emmy for set design, and it’s easy to see why: the loca­tions in this series look phenomenal.  When Beth gets to the Moscow hotel, I kept pausing just to take in the scenery: the art panels in the hallway!  The bedspread!  Not to mention those lamps, and that wallpaper⁠—in fact, rarely does a scene go by that does not prominently feature some delightfully loud wallpaper of some variety.  The Queen’s Gambit also won the Emmy for cos­tumes, and if you go back and click on the hotel hallway pop-up and look at Beth’s coat, it’s hard to imagine what the show could have lost to.  Part of the narrative here is that Beth goes from an ugly duckling with terrible short bangs to a mod fashion plate, and the bandanas they give her, the sunglasses, the Peter Pan collars, the gigantic buttons… the history buff in me was fasci­nated, of course, but to the very limited extent that I get fashion or interior design, well, I was wowed on those levels too.  Oh, and the music!  Some great finds here⁠—this is a show that captures the sound of the ’60s by setting a sequence to, not the obvious (and probably prohibitively expensive) Beatles, but the Monkees, and not the obvious “I’m a Believer”, but its B‑side, “Steppin’ Stone”.  So that’s all great.  But I invested seven hours into The Queen’s Gambit because I wanted to see some chess, and I didn’t really see any chess.  If I had checked out a library book about the prevailing aesthetics of the 1960s and instead got an account of a chess player trying a reversed London System against a Nimzo-Larsen Attack, I would probably be pretty disappointed no mat­ter how exciting the writeup was.

	comment on Tumblr	reply via email	support this site	return to the Calendar page