This piece contains spoilers for the entirety of The Queen’s Gambit.
A confession: I am quite terrible at chess. I do know the rules, but none of the strategy. None of the Nevertheless, inspired by the thrilling chess sequences of The Queen’s Gambit, a Netflix mini-series about a young chess prodigy, I booted up the chess program pre-loaded on my laptop, positioned the difficulty slider quite generously to my advantage… and lost a bishop within seconds. I’m not sure how it happened. It was there one moment, and then it was gone, like a magic trick. But no matter: poor chess ability is no barrier to your enjoyment of The Queen’s Gambit. Not because there isn’t much chess in it – there is! It’s just that while the of the show concerns itself with the particulars of chess, what it’s really tapping into is something far more universal. Namely,
In his seminal work of game studies Homo Ludens, historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga argues that it is not that defines humanity, but rather I came across Huizinga while reading another book, GAMISH: A Graphic History of Gaming by Edward Ross, which is not only a great introduction to game studies but contains a wonderful potted history of chess. The game has been with us in one form or another for over 1400 years and travelled the Silk Roads to become what Steven Johnson calls “one of the first truly global cultural experiences”.
In the 20th Century, chess crossed the threshold into the virtual world. After spearheading the fight to crack the Enigma Code, Alan Turing kept himself busy co-creating Turbochamp, a program that could ‘play’ chess. It was too complex for computers of the time so he had to run the algorithm himself, reading aloud from a printout of the script. Turing was just the latest in a tradition of people trying to create a chess-playing machine. In 1997, IBM’s supercomputer ‘Deep Blue’, capable of calculating 200 million positions per second, finally achieved the impossible: it beat Garry Kasparov in an epic showdown, marking the first time a computer had beaten a Grandmaster.
Today, such technology is commonplace. You can play the 19-times world champion-beating Shredder Chess online right now, but personally I’d recommend someone with a bit more personality:
Not one but virtual Beth Harmons are available, each one fine-tuned to represent the fictional chess prodigy at different points of her life. If you do take up the challenge, regardless of how successful you are, you might find something quite magical happen to you.
It’s the same thing that happens to you when you dive out of the Battle Bus, when you comb the beach of the world’s cosiest desert island or try once more to escape the realm of Hades.
Huizinga describes it as ‘stepping out of “real” life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.’ I can’t get enough of this phrase. You can create one right now by tossing a coin and making a call. The world, for a moment, disappears.