Times 2 - UK (2020-11-13)

(Antfer) #1

the times | Friday November 13 2020 1GT 5


cover story


chess players toy with their opponents,
but it’s not something she recommends.
“You don’t really want to expend any
energy on psyching people,” she says.
“You just want to focus on the game.”
Howell, however, has had a couple
of players deliberately kicking him
under the table during matches — and
worse than that too. Once, when he
was a junior, he was in a final he badly
wanted to win. Yet the night before
people kept ringing his phone and
knocking on his hotel door then

However, Houska says, British


chess needs more funding to enable


more teamwork like this: it’s the best


way for players to go from good to


great. “In other federations around


the world, nobody believes in this


lone-wolf thing.”


Do chess players really psych


each other out?


Now and then players try to get into


Beth’s head to disrupt her play in The


Queen’s Gambit. Houska has seen elite


Above and below:
Anya Taylor-Joy
in The Queen’s
Gambit. Left:
with Thomas
Brodie-
Sangster
in the
series

running away. He later discovered
that it was friends and family of his
opponent. He lost the match. “I barely
slept. I was broken, psychologically.”

Do male chess players
patronise female chess players?

More than we see happen in The
Queen’s Gambit, Houska says. Yes, the
grumpy janitor first expresses disbelief
that a girl could play chess. A few local
types underestimate or patronise her.
After that, “Beth has it very easy,
really. Everyone shows her respect.”
Meanwhile, Houska has had senior
male players undermining her while
she is doing presentations, or ganging
up on her in tournaments, deliberately
playing slowly in their games with her
in an attempt to exhaust her. “That
takes its toll,” she says. “And when
you are young you get the constant
comment that girls can’t play chess.
Boys are very good at shouting girls
down. And this is a problem because
there aren’t so many girls playing
chess. They become timid, they say,
‘Oh, OK, I’ll back off because this boy
sounds very confident.’ ”

Does chess really happen at
such speed?

Part of the appeal of The Queen’s
Gambit is the way the matches happen
so fast, players’ fingers dancing
between chess pieces and chess
clock. Championship chess is more
deliberate, Houska and Howell say,
even if it has speeded up a lot since
the seven-hour matches of the 1960s.
Beth’s games happen more at the
pace of “blitz” chess, which gives each
player a total of three minutes’ playing
time plus two seconds per move, or
“rapid” chess, which is 15 minutes per
player plus ten seconds per move.
“Beth is playing abnormally quickly,”
Houska says. “At that speed you
don’t have time to process all the
thoughts and plans.”

Could a woman become the
best player in the world?

No reason why not. “It is very hard to
explain why there has been only one
woman who has made it to the top ten
in the world and only one other [Hou
Yifan of China] who has made it to the
top 100,” Howell says. “I am optimistic
it will happen one day. In the past the
small participation numbers by
women has made it hard,
probability-wise. Hopefully this
show will inspire more young girls
to play.”
The real issue is social, though.
“I want, before anything, for
chess to be fun for girls to play,”
says Houska, who captains
the England women’s team.
“And to do that we need to
increase the numbers. We
play online; it’s just to
form a community, get
the social side going, all
to reinforce the idea that
chess should be fun.
And then once we’ve
done that we can cater
to all the levels. So that
if a girl wants to be a
Beth Harmon, there’s
the right support
network for her. I want
it to be a level playing
field. Until we get to
that stage I don’t think
we can talk about
biological
or genetic disparities.”
The Queen’s Gambit is
on Netflix

PHIL BRAY/NETFLIX; RAY MORRIS-HILL

How chess (and


The Queen’s


Gambit) saved


my relationship


g


e me use his chess.com username,
which is Pioupiou92 and, in my
opinion, is no less mortifying.
While the ban on overseas travel
and the two-week quarantine rule
has taken any romantic rendezvous
off the cards, a passion for chess is
helping to keep Pioupiou92 and me
sane. Chess has saved our long-
distance relationship on more than
one occasion. We turn to chess.com
for a distraction, funnelling any
frustration into trying to steal each
other’s pawns. As Taylor-Joy and her
cheekbones have shown, chess can be
sexy, so we spice up this geeky date
with an apéro, wine and video chat.
We’re not the only ones with chess
fever, it turns out. According to the
analytics website Sully Gnome, web
users watched 41.2 million hours of
chess on Twitch between March and
August this year, which is four times
more than the previous six months
before the pandemic began. The site
is for serious players, but you don’t
have to be a prodigy to enjoy chess
— just staring at a chess board for
five minutes a day can be fantastic
meditation. When the world outside
feels scary and unpredictable, the
neat squares of a chess board offer
a safe space of predictability where
logic still triumphs.
Jade Cuttle

Jade Cuttle


I’m addicted to The Queen’s Gambit.
For the fictional American chess
prodigy with a troubled past (played
by Anya Taylor-Joy), chess becomes
a drug (along with the tranquillisers
she becomes addicted to). The
narcotic haze of this heightened
focus fills the emptiness of her
young life, rewrites any feeling of
abandonment and becomes her
raison d’être.
In many ways, chess has become
my drug too. I’ve spent hours every
night over these past few months
glued to chess.com, playing against
the boyfriend I’ve barely seen since
the pandemic began; a nighttime
habit that does sometimes dictate
the theme of my dreams, as in The
Queen’s Gambit. My boyfriend is
French, works in Paris as an IT
engineer, is 30 years old and has
begged me to not use his real name
because he’d be mortified if his
friends ever found out that he’s
a secret chess fanatic. He has,
however, compromised by letting
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