4 1GT Friday November 13 2020 | the times
cover story
I
t is the surprise hit of the season.
The Queen’s Gambit, a seven-part
Netflix adaptation of a 1983
novel by Walter Tevis, has
helped to make chess sexy again.
Or, quite possibly, sexier than
ever. It has been Netflix’s most
watched show for two weeks and
counting. What’s more, Anya Taylor-
Joy’s performance as Beth Harmon,
the orphan from Lexington, Kentucky,
who goes on to challenge the best
players in the world, has had an
immediate effect on how chess is seen.
The website chess.com, which has
praised the series for “getting chess
right”, had already been getting three
times as many new members as usual
during the pandemic, according to its
director of business development,
Nick Barton. Since The Queen’s Gambit
started streaming on October 23,
however, its membership has been
growing faster still: 480,000 new
members last week alone. “Seemingly
each day since the show’s release
we’ve been setting a new record for
members joining the site,” Barton says.
Chess matches are back on
television too. Last week Eurosport
signed a deal to broadcast coverage of
the Champions Chess Tour — the first
professional online championship —
from now until September next year.
“Chess is definitely gaining in
popularity,” says Jovanka Houska, the
UK women’s chess champion. “I just
spoke to a friend who had been
interviewed by Vogue.”
The Queen’s Gambit’s adapter and
director Scott Frank worked hard to
“get chess right”. He recruited the
chess teacher Bruce Pandolfini, who
also advised Tevis on the novel, and
the former world champion Garry
Kasparov to help him. And yet the
show is very much fiction. Its
protagonist, Beth Harmon, becomes a
chess sensation in the America of the
1960s. In real life it wasn’t until 2005
that Judit Polgar of Hungary became
the only woman to make it into the
world’s top ten.
Yet the chess community has
embraced the show. The Times’s chess
correspondent, David Howell, 29, a
three-time British chess champion
who became Britain’s youngest
grandmaster at the age of 16, is among
its fans. He calls the chess scenes “well
choreographed and realistic”.
Houska, 40, also loves The Queen’s
Gambit. “I think it’s a fantastic TV
series,” she says. “It conveys theWhat we’ve learnt
about chess from
The Queen’s Gambit
What does the hit drama get right — and wrong? UK
women’s chess champion Jovanka Houska and chess
correspondent David Howell talk to Dominic Maxwell
emotion of chess really well.” And
yet... we had to wonder... this is
television. To entertain us, how many
liberties has the series taken with what
playing chess for a living is really like?Do all top chess players have
emotional issues?Beth Harmon is orphaned, gets
addicted to the tranquillisers they
give her at the orphanage... and the
problems keep coming even after she
gets adopted. She becomes a heavy
drinker and struggles to find human
relationships that rival her relationship
with chess. Is this just a fictional
trope? “I want to say yes, but there
is a degree of obsession in every
high-level athlete everywhere,”
Houska says. “You have to have that
if you want to go further. That is a big
thing that distinguishes us from other
people. But you have normal chess
players who are interested in all sorts
of other things too.”
The character of Beth was partly
inspired by Bobby Fischer, the
American former world champion
famous for his mental struggles and
disruptive behaviour. These days the
top players are more likely to be
micromanaging their sugar and
caffeine intake than spiralling out of
control. “In the levels below, though,
there are cases of people who get lost
in their own minds,” Howell says.
“Some players drink, some playersYou play in
a five-star
hotel one
day and
a dingy
school
room the
next
gamble. Chess players have addictive
personalities, myself included, so I try
not to drink, try not to gamble. It’s a
slippery slope.”Do all chess players have their
own Obi-Wan Kenobi figure?
In The Queen’s Gambit Beth’s chess
mentor is the janitor at her orphanage.
In Howell’s case it was Jonathan
Tuck, a chess coach who spotted
him at a tournament when he was six,
then coached him and travelled with
him to tournaments “without asking
for a penny”.
For Houska it was her father,
Mario. “You need a mentor, it’s
super-important,” she says. “My
father wasn’t an Obi-Wan Kenobi,
he just gave me no choice: ‘This is a
family game and you’re good at it, so
carry on.’ Everyone has had some sort
of inspiration like that.”Can chess earn you good
money?Beth starts making a living from
her playing while still a teenager.
In real life, Houska says, it’s hard to
survive on prize money alone. “To
earn a comfortable living you really
need to be top twenty, maybe top ten
in the world.”
Some countries, such as India
or the US, have well-funded chess
federations that can support their
players. “In western Europe it’s
very tough,” Houska says. “Most
professionals I know are making their
livings from coaching, commentary,
writing books.”
How much does Howell earn from
tournaments? During the pandemic,
he says, nothing: the British Chess
Championships, for example, were
cancelled this year. Normally, prize
money will be about half of his
income. For other top British players
prize money might be as much as
“80 to 90 per cent of their income.
That is a lot of pressure.”Can chess really be that
glamorous?Chess takes Beth from Kentucky to
tournaments in Mexico City, Paris and
Moscow. Nice hotels. Swish dinners. In
reality, Houska says, chess is a game
of extremes. “You can play in the most
glamorous five-star hotel one day, be
crammed in with 80 other people in
the dingiest school room the next,
being forced to share the toilets with
the men. That is the worst.”Is chess really a hotbed
of romance?Beth locks eyes with more than one
fellow chess player in The Queen’s
Gambit. In real life it’s only the
biennial Chess Olympiad, where five
men and five women from variouscountries turn up to compete, where
talk of zugzwangs and Sicilian
Defences is likely to extend to pillow
talk. “It’s one big celebration, in a good
way,” Howell says. “They are all very
serious about the chess, but in any
profession there are situations like
that where stuff happens.”
Howell, who is single and lives with
his family in Seaford, East Sussex,
prefers not to go out with chess
players. He’d rather switch off from
the game. That, Houska says, is quite
rare. She lives in Bergen, Norway, with
her husband, Arne Hagesaether. He
works in IT in the shipping industry,
but they met while competing in a
tournament. “Most couples are formed
within the chess community,” Houska
says. “Rather uniquely, Arne is quite a
bit lower-rated than me.”Do chess players really help
one another out?In The Queen’s Gambit Beth’s rivals
go on to become her training allies.
Really? “I used to try not fraternising
with the enemy,” Howell says. “But
as I’ve got older I’ve realised that,
actually, unless you are in the World
Championship finals or something,
why not? I’ve been on training camps
with some of the best players in the
world, and they are very open about
sharing their ideas.”Jovanka Houska,
the UK women’s
chess championWhen you are
young you get the
constant comment
that girls can’t
play chess