Super-fast computer programs and massive databases have had a profound impact on professional chess in recent years. But, despite the threat of cheating, the game is currently in remarkable creative and economic health – not least because it is fantastically suited to the online world.
CAMBRIDGE – In the brilliant and hugely successful 2020 Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, the chess prodigy Beth Harmon (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) polishes off her male opponents with style and speed. Because the story is set in the 1950s and 1960s, there are no cell phones, social media, or computer chess programs. Life was slower then, as it again seems to be nowadays during the pandemic.
In the 1960s, anyone who wanted to develop a deep knowledge of the game had to pore through tomes like Modern Chess Openings. To learn the latest variations coming out of the Soviet Union, where most of the best players were, there was no choice but to wait for 64 magazine to arrive on a slow boat from Moscow, and then navigate the Russian.
Based on a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis (author of The Color of Money, The Hustler, and The Man Who Fell to Earth), The Queen’s Gambit has a simple premise: What if the American chess player Bobby Fischer – one of the all-time greats – had been a woman? (Tevis, who prided himself on constructing characters from his own imagination, was lucky that his book came out just before the emergence of the amazing Hungarian chess-playing sisters Judit, Zsuzsa, and Zsófia Polgár, whose real-life story would make an even better film.)
CAMBRIDGE – In the brilliant and hugely successful 2020 Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, the chess prodigy Beth Harmon (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) polishes off her male opponents with style and speed. Because the story is set in the 1950s and 1960s, there are no cell phones, social media, or computer chess programs. Life was slower then, as it again seems to be nowadays during the pandemic.
In the 1960s, anyone who wanted to develop a deep knowledge of the game had to pore through tomes like Modern Chess Openings. To learn the latest variations coming out of the Soviet Union, where most of the best players were, there was no choice but to wait for 64 magazine to arrive on a slow boat from Moscow, and then navigate the Russian.
Based on a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis (author of The Color of Money, The Hustler, and The Man Who Fell to Earth), The Queen’s Gambit has a simple premise: What if the American chess player Bobby Fischer – one of the all-time greats – had been a woman? (Tevis, who prided himself on constructing characters from his own imagination, was lucky that his book came out just before the emergence of the amazing Hungarian chess-playing sisters Judit, Zsuzsa, and Zsófia Polgár, whose real-life story would make an even better film.)