How The Queen’s Gambit Created an Authentic Portrayal of Chess Mastery

| November 13, 2020 |

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The Queen's Gambit Chess — *Photograph: Netflix*

Netflix'southward stylish drama The Queen's Gambit might only be the surprise hit of the fall. As adjusted by a 1983 Walter Tevis novel of the aforementioned name, the show's storytelling is on signal, its production pattern spectacular, and star Anya Taylor Joy's outfits…truly staggering.

But the real key to The Queen's Gambit appeal is its focus on one of the earth'due south oldest and about popular games: chess. Thanks to the show (and also probably the global pandemic), chess is having a scrap of a moment right now. Co-ordinate to eBay, the retail site saw a remarkable 273% surge in sales of chess sets in the first x days of the Netflix series' release.

This makes some sense given how The Queen's Gambit is able to make the classic game feel fresh, kinetic, and damn near sensual. There's no doubt that the series' treatment of chess highlights the game's excitement and intellectual rigor involved. Only is that necessarily the nigh accurate representation of it? Well, according to Netflix's production notes and Den of Geek 's interviews with several of the show's stars, that answer is a resounding "yes." It turns out you don't spark a 273% sales surge in a game without treating the playing of said game rather seriously.

In a printing release prior to The Queen'south Gambit 'southward release, Netflix assured critics that the show's creative teams primal objective with chess "was to ensure that if a chess pro saturday downward to watch the serial, they wouldn't be taken out of the story because of the inaccuracy of whatsoever moves."

To that end, the serial brought in two very notable chess experts: longtime chess coach and expert Bruce Pandolfini, and Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Pandolfini is no stranger to advising creative enterprises on their chess skills as he served as an counselor on 1993 chess drama Searching for Bobby Fischer and fifty-fifty helped Tevis with the original Queen's Gambit novel back in the '80s.

Per Netflix, every time someone moves a chess piece on screen, the move was architected by Pandolfini himself.

"Nosotros had to create the chess positions kickoff, and nosotros started with a base of about 100 positions," Pandolfini said in a statement. "I think it mushroomed to close to 500 different chess positions by the end. That'south more than whatsoever other project that's dealt with chess earlier."

In the streaming era, where content exists indefinitely on servers (or at to the lowest degree until Al Gore blessedly pulls the plug on his infernal creation), it's specially of import to go things right the first fourth dimension. It would appear that that's exactly what The Queen'southward Gambit did with its approach to chess.

Of class, bringing in a chess good to choreograph scenes is i thing. It's another affair entirely to motorbus chess novice actors into playing with purpose. In interviews with Den of Geek , the cast revealed how they learned to project say-so while playacting this most difficult game.

For Taylor-Joy, it was helpful to equate chess with something that she was already quite good at.

"I saw the whole thing equally a dance," Taylor-Joy says. "I used to be a dancer, and I saw learning the choreography as trip the light fantastic, but just with your fingers. That'south how I got through the whole affair, 'crusade I was not a peachy chess player when we first started doing this, and past the stop of it, I had to pull upward my bootstraps."

Her co-star Thomas Brodie Sangster (who plays Benny Watts) adopts a similar metaphor.

"Information technology seems silly but it's kinda like riding a horse–it doesn't really matter if you can ride a horse, it'due south more than well-nigh if you can get on the equus caballus and go off the horse and await cool doing it," he says.

Brodie-Sangster and other beau co-star Harry Melling (Harry Beltik) say that showrunner Scott Frank encouraged them to choose a real-life chess pro to model their corresponding games after. Brodie-Sangster went with Bobby Fischer while Melling opted for electric current earth champion Magnus Carlsen.

"That was really fascinating, starting from basis nil really, working out how these people operate, and what makes them tick," Melling says.

According to Brodie-Vocalizer, that dedication to matching existent life chess experts extends into the games themselves.

"Every game in the show is based on a real game, if you've got a really keen centre you can probably recognize games from across the history of chess," the actor says.

In fact, Pandolfini confirmed in an interview with Indiewire that many moves throughout the serial were lifted from real life matches. That adds another level of authenticity that the online chess customs is starting to pick up on, similar Croatian chess expert and YouTuber Antonio Radić.

Of course, most viewers don't demand to know how Elizabeth Harmon's match against Vasily Borgov stacks upwards to 1965's Alexsandar Matanovic five. Leonid Stein. But some viewers do. And the key to making a expert chess series is to make sure that both kinds of viewers are accommodated.

By the finish of The Queen's Gambit 's seven episodes, nevertheless, all the novices have certainly get experts. Now if you'd excuse us, we have some chess boards to buy.