“The Queen’s Gambit”, series on Netflix about a young woman chess champion (but fiction)
I generally haven’t reviewed TV mini-series pf any length on this blog, and generally I still cover them on Blogger. So for something as significant personally as “The Queen’s Gambit”, I decided to watch the first two episodes and do a review (2 hours).
The (fictitious) series title is derived from a well-known chess opening for White (and in this review, White and Black refer to the opposing pieces on the chess board, not to race). The Netflix series was created by Scott Frank and Allan Scott, and the first two episode (“Openings” and “Exchanges”) are directed by Frank.
The story starts when a 9-year-old girl Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor Joy as a woman, Isla Johnston at 9) loses her parents in Kentucky to a car crash in the 1950s. She is put into an orphanage run by an evangelical denomination. The institution (The Methuen Home) hands out tranquilizer pills, which give her unusual ability to concentrate. She accidentally befriends a custodian Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp) who teachers her to play chess in the basement. He skill as a beginner is amazing given that she doesn’t know the nomenclature of moves or the chess board, or what a chess clock is.
A major climax happens when the home stops giving out the pills, leading to a bizarre sequences showing “The Robe” in the home theater, with Alfred Newman’s “Hallelujah” (which is interesting music), while she breaks into the pharmacy in steals the drugs. In one interesting scene, she gives a simultaneous exhibition (but doesn’t know how they work). By the way, I once drew a game against an IM in a simultaneous with a Sicilian Schevenigen.
In episode 2, she gets adopted by a family, and in time her adoptive mom wants to teach her about her future becoming a mother. (That idea had occurred in “Cuties”). But Beth arranges to get herself into a United States Chess Federation (USCF) tournament – even as she is naïve about. She gets paired against a couple of unrated (young adult male) players who happen, like her, to be very strong. She wins one game with a counter gambit in the Center Counter defense (her opponent hangs a rook to a knight check), and then she wins with White against the Caro Kann in a replay of a famous game from the 1950s, delivering a spectacular mate on the edge of the board at the end. There is a bathroom scene, where she excuses herself, noted in a video about that game that I embedded on Blogger. One thing that is very annoying, is that she talks to her opponents, which is definitely not allowed in USCF tournaments.
Now for some ad hoc remarks.
USCF used to be on E 11th St in NYC, across the street from the Cast Iron Building, where I lived in the 1970s. It would move to Newburgh and then to Tennessee.
I played a lot of chess at the George Washington University chess club (on Friday afternoons) in the fall of 1964 and improved quickly. I played on the team, finally drew, and then started playing in tournaments, the first at the Washington Chess Divan near Capitol Hill in 1965. I entered a major tournament at the Mayflower Hotel in the summer of 1965 (I won a game with the same Caro Kann there). In time I got into the 1800s and 1900s.
In the 1960s, Queen Pawn openings were coming to be seen as more “virtuous”, emphasizing slower maneuvers and more pawns and pieces on the board well into the middle game, as people started learning all the sharp King Pawn openings (although the Ruy Lopez is very positional in closed lines). There was a time with “the central dogma of biology” though viewing the Exchange Variation of the Queens Gambit Declined as almost leading to a winning ending for White because of the backward pawn/isolated pawn problem coming from the “minority attack” on the Q-side. That is no longer the view today.