Daily Archives: November 6, 2020

Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen's Gambit.

If you're still buzzing after Beth Harmon's triumph in The Queen's Gambit, let's dive even further into the excellent Netflix miniseries. From whether it's based on a true story of a chess prodigy to what a "Queen's Gambit" is exactly, we'll hopefully have all your questions covered.

Read more: The Haunting of Bly Manor ending explained, and all your questions answered

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Young Beth learns chess from Mr. Shaibel, her orphanage's janitor.

While The Queen's Gambit comes across as an inspirational sports story, it's an adaptation of a 1983 fictional coming-of-age novel of the same name written by American novelist Walter Tevis. Tevis was a chess player himself and consulted real-life chess masters to ensure he accurately depicted the intricacies and rules of professional chess. So no, Elizabeth Harmon isn't based on a real orphaned chess prodigy from the '50s and '60s. But if you're looking for a female chess player to read up on, Judit Polgar of Hungary is generally considered the strongest female chess player ever.

In chess, a gambit is an opening move in which the player will sacrifice pieces to later gain a positive position. According to The Chess Website, "The Queen's Gambit is probably the most popular gambit and although most gambits are said to be unsound against perfect play the Queen's Gambit is said to be the exception." It's the move Beth uses in her final winning match against Vasily Borgov, the Russian world champion. "The objective of the queen's gambit is to temporarily sacrifice a pawn to gain control of the center of the board."

When Beth was 9, her real mother Alice committed suicide by driving into an oncoming vehicle. She first drives to Beth's father's house, where his new wife answers with their young son. Alice asks Paul for help with taking care of Beth, but Paul frantically rushes her away from his new family. He says she can come back another time and they'll talk, but it's been five years since they last saw each other and he's clearly moved on. With nowhere to take Beth, Alice attempts to kill them both in the crash. Beth miraculously survives, but suffers from emotional issues throughout her life.

Beth and Benny Watts.

At Beth's orphanage, the Methuen Home for Girls, the children are given tranquillizer pills to make them compliant. When a law is passed forbidding this and Beth's pills are taken away, she suffers withdrawals and continues to struggle with her addiction to the drug.

After her whirlwind romance with pen pal Manuel in Mexico City ends, Mrs. Wheatley doesn't show up to Beth's match with Borgov. Beth returns to her hotel room to discover Mrs. Wheatley dead. The coroner expects it was hepatitis, an inflammatory condition of the liver. Mrs. Wheatley was an alcoholic, running up a huge bill on margaritas at the hotel.

The first time Beth plays Benny Watts, the reigning US champion, at the US Open in Las Vegas, he defeats her. Later, with the help of ex-Kentucky state champion Harry Beltik, Beth learns to study her opponents and the big games in their careers, instead of just relying on her intuition and improvising in the moment. She buys a copy of Chess Review with a feature on Watts and asks him questions about himself in person, like why he carries around a knife (he says it's protection from "whatever"). In the final match of the US Championship in Ohio, Beth swiftly defeats him in 30 moves. She allows him to play the same move he played to defeat her the first time -- trading queens -- but this time she's prepared.

Beth and Borgov.

When Beth plays her final match against Borgov in Russia, he requests they adjourn until the next day. This means he must write his next move on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. The director will then kick off the next session with the prepared move. This ensures neither player knows what the board will look like when it's their next turn.

In the final match between Beth and Borgov at the Moscow Invitational, Beth appears to be the more tired of the two, after playing several long matches in a row. But it's Borgov who requests they end the session and pick up the following day. This decision could point to Borgov's interview in a tape Beth watches while training with Harry, where Borgov talks about coming up against people half his age, like Beth, and doesn't know how long he can continue winning. "I can fight against anyone but time." It's possible he too is tired and, recognizing Beth's fatigue, believes it fair to call the adjournment. He might also already feel threatened he'll lose, so retreats to consult the other Russian players -- Beth stumbled upon Borgov helping previous world champion Luchenko in the adjournment of their match a day or two before.

The highly detailedchess sequences were put together by chess coach Bruce Pandolfini (who consulted on the original novel), with advice from Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov. They likely used chess engines, computer programs that analyze chess positions and generate a list of strongest moves, as well as faithfully matching scenarios in the book and drawing from real games. For example, Beth and Borgov's final match, up until a point, is based on a game between Ukrainian Vasyl Ivanchuk and American Patrick Wolff at the Biel Interzonal chess tournament in Switzerland in 1993, according to chess YouTube channel agadmator. While that game ended in a draw, Beth ends up finding a different move that leads to her win. Borgov's standing to applaud Beth after she wins is a reference to a famous match between defending champion Russian Boris Spassky and American opponent Bobby Fischer at the 1972 World Championship in Iceland, depicted in the 2014 film Pawn Sacrifice. When Fischer wins, Spassky joins in with the audience's applause.

The Queen's Gambit has been generally praised by critics. Though it's received good reviews from chess players, a criticism has been aimed at the exclusive use of men's games as the basis for its fictional contests. "The Queen's Gambit is so brilliant but using some women's games would have been awesome," former US Women's Chess Champion Jennifer Shahade tweeted.

The Queen's Gambit is dedicated to Iepe Rubingh, the inventor of chess boxing, who died aged 45 in May this year of unknown causes. Chess boxing is a hybrid sport, where competitors compete in alternating rounds of chess and boxing.

Beth overcomes her demons to finally defeat her greatest rival, bringing her story to a satisfying conclusion and not seeming to tee up more for a second season. Though the actors,including Anya Taylor-Joy, have said they're open and willing to return to their characters in future episodes, showrunner Scott Frank, whose adaptation of Tevis' book finishes at the same point as the source material, doesn't sound like he has ideas in mind for more material.

"This was the single best experience I've had in a 30-some-odd year career full of really nice experiences. So it's saying a lot," the writer-director toldEntertainment Weekly. "I have no idea how people are going to take it, but it's the first time I'm willing to admit just how happy I am. Normally I'm afraid to ever say that."

"Maybe we can just let the audience imagine what comes next," Executive Producer William Horberg toldTown & Country.

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The Queen's Gambit: That ending explained and all your questions answered - CNET

The best sports show on TV doesn't involve football or hockey, the NBA or MLB, or re-runs of classics.

Rather, in all its at-times glamorous but often gritty details, the standout exploration of competition is a period melodrama about chess, set in the 1950s and 1960s, starring an actress who was previously best-known for portraying Jane Austen's Emma.

The show is Netflix's seven-episode limited series, "The Queen's Gambit," and it's a stunner. As chess prodigy Elizabeth "Beth" Harmon, Anya Taylor-joy has become autumn's biggest star and in the process lit up the chess world to such a degree that the 24-year-old talent could do for the game what Bobby Fischer achieved in 1972 when he defeated Boris Spassky in Iceland to capture the World Chess Championship, becoming the only American ever to do so.

"The Queen's Gambit" is superb TV really, a long movie, with gorgeous cinematography, remarkable acting from a sizeable cast, a fine score from Carlos Rafael Rivera, and impeccable direction from Scott Frank, whose previous Netflix series, 2017's "Godless," was also a great piece of work, a revitalizing western starring Jeff Daniels as a figure of Cormac McCarthy-grade malevolence.

Bobby Fischer also challenged the dominance of Russian chess in the 1960s and 1970s. Getty Images

The menace in "The Queen's Gambit" is more diffuse: it's an amalgam of Cold War-era paranoia and male privilege, the rigors of top-level chess, and Beth Harmon's own manifold inner demons.

Orphaned by her mother's violent suicide (we're led to assume that Beth was supposed to die, too), Harmon is taken in by a Kentucky institute for girls where tranquilizers are on the daily menu and chess is played, surreptitiously, by a kindly, taciturn janitor in the facility's Stygian basement.

From here, the plot should be predictable: Beth becomes an obscure, tormented genius, her gifts imprisoned until a sequence of events sets her on a dramatic path to twisting destiny.

Rey Skywalker, Harry Potter, King Arthur we've all been here before. Beth has her Merlin in the subterranean shadows, and later a run of heroic challenges, the most daunting being her simultaneous dependence on Librium and red wine, chugged straight from the bottle.

The marvelous, engaged acting elevates "The Queen's Gambit" far above its many, many clichs. And awaiting it, supporting it, enhancing it at every step is the relatively meticulous attention to chess detail and the overarching premise that the game is not a game. Still, an intensely competitive sport played not just by solo savants but, ultimately, by teams.

Nona Gaprindashvili was the strongest female player of Fischer's generation. Woods/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Team Beth winds up being quite scrappy, as even high-grade US chess was in the 1960s. Her most daunting foes are, of course, the Soviets, whose Cold War chess was anything but rough around the edges. Few actual historical players are presented in the story, adapted from a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis. The reigning world champion is Vasily Borgov, a mashup of Spassky and Tigran Petrosian, with a sly touch of current world champ Magnus Carlsen thrown in (Borgov, like Carlsen, is described as a master of the endgame).

But Beth confronts plenty of rivals, all-male, along the way. Two become boyfriends, and then coaches. That might sound offensive, but it adds some helpful romantic sizzle to the depiction of a world that was certainly sexy in a Gibsons-and-Chesterfields, Rat-Pack-in-Vegas, James-Bondish sort of way back when JFK and LBJ were in the White House but that was also, well, full of socially awkward young men playing chess.

(A significant element, almost entirely omitted in the series, is that there was a women's pro chess tour in the 1950s and 1960s, too, with its own world champions, including five-time winner Nona Gaprindashvili, the only real-life player depicted in the series, and then only in a pan of an audience, with the voiceover acknowledgment that she had never faced the Soviet men.)

In any case, the real sizzle is in the chess, which has never been depicted better on screen.

"Searching for Bobby Fischer" had been the gold standard, but it avoided the deep intricacies of adult, professional chess. In "The Queen's Gambit," Beth completely skips kid chess and leapfrogs, in her first notable title, to top board against an overconfident Kentucky state champion (a plaintive Harry Melling). From there, it's grownups all the way, with Beth making bank, buying beautiful clothes, and fighting the pills and the booze as much as her opponents.

Beth loses a game in an opening favored by the most recent World Chess Championship challenger, American Fabiano Caruana. Spectrum Studios

"The Queen's Gambit" could have covered all of this with some offhand references to the Sicilian Defense and a bunch of closeups of the pieces being pushed around the board, accompanied by furrowed scowls or smug grins from the actors. But the filmmakers instead asked former world champion Garry Kasparov and "Searching for Bobby Fischer" consultant Bruce Pandolfini for advice, to infuse the series with chess, chess, and more chess.

Not one but two variations of the Sicilian Defense make an appearance: the Najdorf and the Rossolimo, the latter a favorite of the most recent challenger for the World Championship title, American Fabiano Caruana (After an all-night bender with a Parisian temptress, Beth loses a Rossolimo Sicilian to Borgov in her first showdown with the steely Russian, played with heft and precision by Marcin Dorociski).

There's a savage joke about the Caro-Kann, an opening wielded by Carlsen in Game 2 of the 2013 World Chess Championship: Benny Watts one of Beth's paramours, the cocky US champion with a taste for black leather dusters, jauntily played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster says it's "all pawns and no hope."

Beth recounts a victory to her adoptive mother and quips about playing the "Marshall," shorthand for a variety of openings named from Frank Marshall, the US champion for most of the first third of the 20th century and the namesake of the famous Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan.

The Queen's Gambit of the series title also makes a crucial appearance, in a now much-discussed reference to Game 6 of the 1972 World Chess Championship, when Fischer played white and opened with moves that transposed to a Queen's Gambit Declined position and defeated Spassky in a masterpiece that put the volatile American ahead and prompted Spassky to lead a standing ovation for his opponent.

Taylor-Joy is no stranger to period drama; her she is in "Emma." Focus Features

Fischer never played this opening, preferring a King's Pawn game: 1. e4, for the chess-heads. Likewise, Beth is a dedicated 1. e4 player, befitting her reputation as a flamboyant, attacking competitor who disdains draws and relishes the moment when you "break his ego" what Fischer in 1971 told talk-show host Dick Cavett is the greatest pleasure in competitive chess.

Harmon shatters all the male egos she faces, across the chessboard and other contexts, and she breaks several hearts. But she also garners respect, a development in her character that extends beyond Netflix.

A top chess YouTuber, Antonio Radi, has already tracked down her important games from the series, as the consultants based them on real duels. And he's analyzed them as Harmon games, elevating Taylor-Joy's unexpected contributions to chess history (Vassily Ivanchuk vs. Patrick Wolff, Biel 1993 the basis for the series' final game might henceforth be better known as Harmon vs. Borgov, Moscow 1968).

Actual chess players, or at least their names, figure in the story. The great American player Paul Morphy comes up, as do legends such as Jos Capablanca alongside personalities and events only true chess aficionados would know: Reuben Fine, the Hastings International Chess Congress, the importance of 1600 Elo ranking.

Conspicuously absent, of course, is Fischer. But that's because Harmon is Fischer, in the alternate universe of the series.

Actually, with her reputation for playing "intuitive" chess, rather than pondering reams of theory, she more like a Fischer antecedent and a player who Fischer adored: the Latvian world champion, Mikhail Tal, considered by many to be the greatest attacking player of all time (Tal drank a lot and smoked a lot while he devised devastating combinations, piece sacrifices, and otherworldly checkmating maneuvers, but unlike Harmon, who overcomes addiction, he embraced his demons and died at 55.)

Latvian chess champion Mikhail Tal was known as "The Magician from Riga." Photo by Dennis Oulds/Central Press/Getty Images

We don't end up searching for Bobby, however. Beth is outlandishly captivating, and Taylor-Joy brings an often wordless, physical, yet transcendent style to the role that's equal measures intimidating and alluring, animated by a ferocious intelligence. As a competitor, Harmon is obsessed. So the second half of the series focuses on how her individual intensity is transformed into a team effort.

This is where "The Queen's Gambit" nails big-time chess. There might be just two players at the board, but there are squads behind each side, and for the Soviets in the 1960s, that was a national advantage. All the finest players in the world worked together to elevate the finest among them, and in the series, Borgov doesn't spend time alone: he huddles with his seconds, plotting, and planning.

Harmon is a one-woman army, at least chess-wise, until the final episodes (she receives considerable support, emotional and financial, from the best performer in the show, Moses Ingram as Beth's best friend from the orphanage, Jolene; Ingram steals every scene she's in).

First, Benny transports her to his grim basement apartment in New York to partake of la vie bohme and undergo a serious training regimen only briefly interrupted by the hot sex we all knew was on the agenda.

Then, with Harmon staring down a second defeat by Borgov, this time in Moscow while all Russia watches, Benny and Beth's original romantic fixation, a chess journalist named Townes, organize a transatlantic team of informal seconds who use a long-distance call during an adjournment to devise a winning line. (When Borgov doesn't cooperate, Beth has to summon all she's got to find victory without the Librium and the vin rouge.)

Adjournments are gone, but this is how the world's chess elite manage their encounters. Carlsen and Caruana didn't saunter into London in 2018 and battle for the World Championship as independent operators. Both had grandmasters in their camps and months of preparation behind them, and the best computer chess analysis engines money could buy helping them break down each others' strengths and weaknesses.

"Do you know why they're the best players in the world?" Benny asks Beth of the Soviets at one point in their training sessions.

"Because they have the best suits?" Beth counters, still dismissive of the notion that she needs anyone else to beat Borgov.

"It's because they play together as a team," Benny says, with a severity that verges on mansplaining. But Beth knows he's right.

Irina Krush won the 2020 US Women's Chess Championship, her eighth title. Getty Images

Without these extras, "The Queen's Gambit" still would have been exhilarating. Still, it might not have snared the admiration of the serious chess community, which is used to the game being reduced to a caricature of the intellectually complicated and physically demanding throwdown it often is, with grueling contests that extend past 100 moves and leave both players slumped in their chairs.

Chess folks are also well aware of how much the game has evolved in gender roles since the 1960s. Hungary's Judit Polgr made a habit during her serious playing career of taking out top-ranked men, included Kasparov, and Irina Krush just won her eighth US Women's Championship. Two-time US women's champ Jennifer Shahade, with Yasser Seirawan and Maurice Ashley, is a member of the best chess commentary team this side of "Monday Night Football" in its heyday.

Ultimately, the beautiful achievement of "The Queen's Gambit" is that it evokes the 1960s and 1970s period when chess had been elevated to the same plane as more recognizable sports, with Fischer making the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1972. Beth lands in Life magazine, but her character is both better than Fischer and worse.

Like Fischer, famous for his collection of bespoke suits, Beth adores good clothes and outdresses the competition. But unlike Fischer, Beth needs the pills and the wine to arrive at what she calls a "cloudy" state to play at her best (she eventually adds cigarettes to the cocktail).

What prevents "The Queen's Gambit" from becoming "The Karate Kid" with knights and rooks instead of "wax on, wax off" and crane kicks is the exceptional woodpusher detail combined with Harmon's rise, through a system stacked against her, to become if not world champion, then a threat to the world champion, a reason for Borgov to both applaud and lose sleep at night.

She's a contender, and like any great athlete in sports, she leaves the fans wanting more. And they might get it if Netflix pursues a second season. Fifty years ago, Fisher set off a chess boom that, in his words, welcomed everyone: men and women, young and old. How interesting it would be if Beth Harmon encourages a new boom, and more women than ever set their sights on the big time.

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Netflix's 'The Queen's Gambit' is the best sports show on TV right now - Business Insider - Business Insider