I have finally watched “The Queen’s Gambit”. It was ironic that it took me so long – I have been a tournament chess player since the 1960’s, but it seemed that everybody around me saw this miniseries before I got around to it.
It’s an interesting and entertaining story, but the really remarkable thing about this show is the accurate depiction of tournament chess. As all tournament players, and even some less experienced players, understand, most depictions of chess in movies and on television don’t even get the basics of setting up a board right. They tend to inadvertently rotate the board, and set up the pieces on the wrong squares in the starting position, or to set up game positions that are impossible to reach in a real game. And having gotten those things wrong, movie and television directors often go on to depict unlikely behavior by the players – elementary violations of sportsmanship and etiquette, for example. Occasionally, a producer will pay a “technical consultant” for advice on avoiding such gaffes, but even then, one seldom sees anything close to realism.
The producers of “The Queen’s Gambit” hired the best consultants they could have found. One, Garry Kasparov, is a former world champion of chess. The other, Bruce Pandolfini, is a strong player, a well-known teacher, and, perhaps importantly, he is the right age – he would have been a near contemporary of the protagonist, Beth Harmon, if she had existed. Pandolfini and Kasparov played active roles in the production; Pandolfini describes their work in the November 2020 issue of Chess Life, the print magazine for members of US Chess. The result of their collaboration was truly a pleasure for me to watch, accustomed as I am to seeing basic errors on screen.
To put this in perspective, I have to admit that they didn’t hire technical consultants to give them advice on the effects of tranquilizers, or on race relations in the United States in the 1960’s; I suspect that they were flying by the seat of their pants, or relying on the late Walter Tevis, the author of the novel, to have done his research well. I learned in high school English class about the “willing suspension of disbelief”, and I had to do plenty of it here.
But it’s still marvelous to see a reasonably lifelike fictional depiction of the chess milieu. Following in the footsteps of the New York Times columnist, Dylan Loeb McClain, I’m going to describe some of the things they “got right”, and some of the things they “got wrong”.
I enjoyed seeing “period” issues of Chess Review, which was the leading chess magazine in the United States for decades, but has not been published since the late 1960’s. The chess books that are mentioned are also appropriate for the era, and in the case of Modern Chess Openings, which has gone through 15 editions since it was first published in 1911, they depicted just the right edition for the early 1960’s. I was also amused by all the cigarette smoke in the air at the Kentucky tournament. I used to come home from the Pittsburgh chess club, in the mid 1960’s, smelling like an ash tray – it was a family joke. For several decades now, almost all chess tournaments in this country have been “no smoking allowed”, but there was nothing like that in the 1960’s.
A nice touch was to have both Matt and Mike at the registration table at the Kentucky tournament. It used to be a good idea to have two people at the table – one to look up people’s ratings, the other to do the paperwork. Nowadays it’s just one person and a laptop. Thoughtful of them to think of that.
In adult tournaments in the U.S., players are expected to bring their own boards, sets, and clocks. So the scenes from the Kentucky, Cincinnati, and Las Vegas tournaments, in which boards are already set up before the start of each round, are not quite right. By comparison, in Europe, boards and sets are expected to be provided by the organizer, or at least that’s how it was when I was playing chess over there in the early 1980’s. Of course, in kids’ tournaments, the smart organizer will not expect the kids to bring enough equipment, because they are kids.
It’s highly unrealistic that people talk to each other during the games. That’s very rare in adult tournaments. You can get in trouble for harassing your opponent. Again, Pandolfini and Kasparov would have known this (it would have been burned into their brains when they first started out in chess). I realize that in kids’ tournaments, it’s another story.
Other than the occasional talking during games, the general depiction of the comportment of players and spectators, and the etiquette, is correct. This includes the brief moment when Beth starts talking with another person near to a game that’s going on, and one of the players turns around, gives them a very annoyed look, and says, “Do you MIND?” I chuckled at that, because I’ve played both roles in that scene many times!
It bothered me somewhat that Beth wins the state championship in her first tournament. I doubt that there is any precedent for someone winning the championship of a medium-sized state like Kentucky in their first tournament. Although I have to admit, I knew a guy (here in Pittsburgh) whose first published rating was 1900, strong enough to win the championships of some of the small states. He had “paid his dues” by hanging around Pittsburgh area chess clubs, playing unofficial games with the strongest area players, for some time.
As Beth gets stronger, she plays in stronger tournaments, and goes abroad. My own experience with international tournaments was limited – I never attended an event where there was live commentary, for instance. But in the scenes from the tournaments in Mexico City, Paris, and Moscow, I noticed that the procedure for adjournments was portrayed correctly. I didn’t like the scene in which Beth and the young boy, Georgi Girev, play off their adjourned game. Beth gets up from the board but hovers nearby, communicating clearly (but without words) that she thinks her opponent is hapless and his position is resignable. Poor etiquette does sometimes happen in strong tournaments, but the show shouldn’t depict it as if it were normal.
In these contests, Beth always meets her hardest opponent in the last round. This is actually rare in chess tournaments. For instance in a round-robin event, like the one in Moscow, pairings will be drawn by lot, and she could get paired with Borgov in any of the rounds, even the first one. This is one of the things that I am sure they deliberately got wrong, that is, they slightly fudged the realism, in order to improve the drama of the fiction.
Another thing that they deliberately got wrong: players move much too quickly (i.e. they don’t spend any time thinking). Of course, it wouldn’t be possible to depict tournament play at realistic speeds, where a single game could take several hours. There is a similar problem in portraying other sports in a movie. For example, a realistic baseball game consists mostly of called balls and strikes; but whenever baseball is depicted in a movie, all you see is people hitting, running, catching – anything but called balls and strikes.
In this miniseries, no drawn (tied) games are depicted. In high-level tournaments, including the Las Vegas tournament and the international tournaments, perfect scores are impossibly rare. Indeed, much of the drama arises because even the strongest players end up with several draws each. It is not unusual to see a player win a tournament in spite of having lost a game to another player (as Beth does in Las Vegas). Often, the leading players draw with each other, and the one who has the best record against the rest of the field wins the tournament.
It was also noticeable that the pieces made too much noise when the players moved them from one square to another. Nowadays, equipment used in adult tournaments normally features felted pieces and plastic roll-up boards, so that the sound made by setting a piece on the board is not noticeable. I admit, though, I don’t remember if equally quiet equipment was used in the 1960’s. It’s possible that for the movie they deliberately selected noisy equipment, for the benefit of the movie audience.
The crucial position in Beth’s game against Luchenko was due to some inspired tinkering by Kasparov, starting with the score of a game played in 1988 by two Armenian grandmasters. The story of the behind-the-scenes work is told by Pandolfini in the article for Chess Life.
In the dramatic scenes of the Moscow game between Beth and Borgov, that game is the only one going on. That’s clearly wrong, there should be three (as in the previous rounds).
I learned from another review on the Web that this game was based on a game played in 1993 between two grandmasters, Patrick Wolff and Vasyl Ivanchuk. The opening of that game was a Queen’s Gambit Accepted. But in the movie, the commentator announces a different opening, “Queen’s Gambit, Albin Counter Gambit”, and gives the moves of that variation (translated to modern notation, 1. d4 d5 2. c4 e5). This is a huge and surprising gaffe. Also, the first position you see on the camera is one that didn’t actually occur in the Wolff versus Ivanchuk game, though it is a legal position; it could only have arisen from fairly bad moves by both sides. So this is not the kind of flawless example that I expected from Kasparov – in fact I noticed it immediately when we were watching. By the way, if you can read chess game scores, you can look up that game on the Web – just type the last names of the players and the year number.
I really didn’t like it, after that last Harmon vs. Borgov game, that he embraced her. NOBODY feels like that after losing a game. Sportsmanship is good, but a hearty handshake is the standard thing. The story goes that after one of the games of the Fischer vs. Spassky world championship match, when the audience started applauding after the game, Spassky (who had lost) joined in with the applause. Fischer commented favorably on Spassky’s sportsmanship in doing so. But, a hug? Where did that come from?