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Chess is making a comeback onto the national stage. The Netflix series,Queen's Gambit,has elevated curiosityregarding the game, jolting interest and boosting the sales of chess sets and informational books.

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Dominate the chess board with these low-cost comprehensive grandmaster courses | TheHill - The Hill

Beth Harmon is making her next move.

A production company led by a Disney heir is planning to adapt The Queens Gambit into a stage musical. The fictional story is about an orphan girl thats Harmon who becomes a pill-popping prodigy in the overwhelmingly male world of chess.

Level Forward, a company whose founders include Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, said on Monday that it has won the rights to adapt Walter Teviss 1983 novel, which has become newly noteworthy thanks to the enormous success of last years streaming series adaptation on Netflix.

Level Forward is not yet announcing a creative team or any other details of the project.

The company has a decidedly progressive bent (it describes itself as an ecosystem of storytellers, business people and social change organizers), and is a relatively recent but active player in the theater industry, co-producing four Broadway shows in 2019: What the Constitution Means to Me, Slave Play, Jagged Little Pill and a revival of Oklahoma!

The game of chess, although seemingly unlikely fodder for song-and-dance, has inspired at least one other musical: In the 1980s, the lyricist Tim Rice collaborated with Benny Andersson and Bjrn Ulvaeus of Abba to write Chess, a fictional account of a tournament between an American and a Soviet grandmaster. The show had a well-received score that remains an object of affection and fascination for some, but, despite repeated efforts at revisions, it has not found success onstage; it ran for two months on Broadway in 1988.

The Queen's Gambit project is just at the start of its developmental life, and its not yet clear when or where there might be a production.

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Making Chess Sing: Queens Gambit to Be Adapted for the Stage - The New York Times

Right now, a stalemate is considered a draw. But before the 1800s, it was considered a win for the losing player. These rules were heavily dependent on the region the game took place in, and as noted in Harold J. R. Murrays A History of Chess, a stalemate win was commonly considered to be an inferior win, and any player who won a competitive chess match in this way would only receive half of their winnings. Since then, chess experts have gone back and forth with regards to the rule. As recently as 2009, grand master Larry Kaufman argued in the 35th issue of Chess Life that a stalemate shouldnt be a draw, because its a situation where any move would get your king taken.

Stalemate remains a draw because of chesss propensity to create draws. Implementing a rule change on that scale would make hundreds of years of endgame theory irrelevant.

The White Side Advantage

While reviewing competitive chess matches from the years 1852 to 1932, chess theorist William Franklyn Streeter found that across more than 5,000 games played, the white side was slightly more likely to win. As reported in Chess Review in May 1946, this trend has maintained into the present day despite changes to the rule set.

Since tournament matches were recorded, white has been calculated to have around a 5 percent higher chance of winning than the opposition, because it gets the first movesomething statistics and theorists have agreed on throughout history. If the white side can construct an opening that maintains its innate advantage, it can carry that boost into the rest of the game. Its up to the black side to construct a defense that will swing the initiative back into its favor and fight for a draw if thats not possible.

The attacking and defending sides are decided the moment the game begins. Over time, playersincluding grand master Larry Kaufman in his 2004 book The Chess Advantage in Black and White: Opening Moves of the Grandmastershave argued that, if played perfectly, the white side should always win. You can't take a piece by purely playing defensively, while you can when always being the aggressor. It's hard to imagine a change to the game that would adjust this without giving one side an option the other doesn't have.

But does such a change need to be made? While the numbers suggest that the game is tilted towards the attacking side, it's still a theory that doesn't always work out when humans are involved. If given infinite amounts of time, a high-level chess player could divine the best movebut most competitive chess formats restrict the players' time. Nowadays, most rule changes, or patch notes, are toward the clock's usage and how the players and referees (or arbiters) conduct themselves in the game. For instance, you can't have any electronic device capable of communication while playing in a competitive match.

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A Humans Touch

The human aspect is what sculpts competitive chess. If everyone made the correct move instantly, the game would play out the same waybut very few can play perfectly under a timer, and even fewer are able to come up with the best move at all. Chess's modern rule sets are different because of what goes on around the game, rather than in itsomething that is rarely seen in esports, where the players are bound by the game's code.

Blitz chess is a subcategory that includes any format where players have less than 10 minutes to make their moves. Bullet chess, with one minute per side, is the fastest among them. Stricter time limits push players to make mistakes. With such limits in place, new strategies ariseyou can complicate the game board to give your opponent something to think about, or start simplifying it so that a standard win becomes more feasible.

But does that make chess balanced? The white pieces still move ahead of the black ones. The attacker could start with an opening, and the defender still needs to respond. The time limit may mitigate things, but if all things are equal, the proactive player would still win most of the time if they make the mathematically best move. There are a finite number of board states in chess, but that number is so vast that its impossible to navigate them all within a reasonable amount of time. Someone might be able to pilot a strong opening into the rest of the game, but if the defending player understands how to complicate it, they can still wrestle control back to their side. Chess has always been that way; the changes made over the centuries have made the pieces more interactable. If both players open by moving opposing pawns, they come in contact within two moves as opposed to four moves in older versions of the game.

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The Game of Chess Had Patch Notes, Too - WIRED

RAPID CITY, S.D. Once a month, chess lovers gather at Code Ninjas in Rapid City a coding center for kids to practice the art of the checkmate.

The Chess Club meets every first and third Saturdays to share their hobby. It promotes increased knowledge and understanding of the game as an art form and an intellectual sport.

Eli Wright, who was taught how to play by his dad, says his favorite part of chess is never quite being able to predict the outcome.

The strategyanyone can outplay anyone just depends on how you play it. Thats my favorite part about it, said Wright.

Wright, who watched Queens Gambit, a dramatic mini-series that follows the life of an orphan chess prodigy, says there arent enough scenes showing the chess pieces. As far as someday playing professionally, he says thats not part of the game plan saying, you have to be very, very good.

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Chess lovers practice the art of the checkmate - KNBN NewsCenter1 - Newscenter1.tv

The Opera Game|Available on-demand on Amazon

Triangle native William Ken Mask is a bit of a renaissance man. The Hamlet native first moved to the Triangle for an undergraduate degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, traveling down Tobacco Road, afterward, to the Duke University School of Medicine.

But in the spirit of an artistic polymath cast in the mold of, say, Gordon Parks, Mask is also a novelist, childrens book author, musician, and filmmaker who has honed and nurtured an arts career that feels like an extension of his healing practices.

This month I watched The Opera Game, which Mask produced and co-wrote with Simon Marsalis, who is the son of jazz musician Wynton Marsalis.

The Opera Game reviews the short, brilliant, and ultimately tragic life of Paul Morphy, who, during the pre-Civil War period in the late 1850s, was recognized as a chess prodigy. Even though Morphy at the height of his fame turned his back on the game, he is still widely considered one of the greatest chess players to ever live.

The films title is drawn from an 1858 chess match held at an opera house in Paris between Morphy and two talented amateurs, a German noble and French aristocrat.

The Opera Game draws inevitable comparisons to Netflixs runaway hit, The Queens Gambit.

With The Queens Gambit, the filmmakers are playing close attention to the chess, Mask says. We are playing close attention to [Morphys] life, instead of the next great chess move. We try to document whats happening in someones life outside of what theyre known for.

In the film, a Black man (Jesse, played by Archie Sampier) serves as Morphys confidant and mentor, and two Black women (Karen Livers and Idella Johnson) also play main characters. It was imperative , Mask says, to show free men and women of color in roles other than that of bowing down and saying yasum.

The 79-minute period piece is directed by Monty Ross, who co-founded, alongside Spike Lee, the production company 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. Ross also co-produced many of Lees early films, including Do The Right Thing, School Daze, and Malcolm X. He says that the film also relied on the consulting work of actor and friend Wendell Pierce, a veteran stage and film actor best known for his role as Bunk in the landmark television series, The Wire. Another veteran from the series, Clarke Peters, narrates The Opera Game.

Mask, who often travels with the jazz giants orchestras and bands internationally, ostensibly for medical emergencies, says that he met Ross through one of Wyntons percussionists,

They call me the Country Doctor, Mask says jokingly.

The beautifully filmed Opera Game is set in New Orleans, where Morphy was born to Alonzo Michael Morphy, who would serve as a Louisiana attorney general, and Louise Thrse Flicit Thelcide Le Carpentier, who came from a prominent French Creole family.

Which means she had some Black blood, Mask adds. I dont care how you shake it.

The Opera Game chronicles Morphy learning to play chess while watching his father and uncle play. He was only 10 when he soundly defeated a Hungarian chess master who was visiting New Orleans; later, he traveled to Europe, where he defeated all of the acknowledged masters willing to play him.

Morphy was 20 when he first arrived in London in 1858. Upon returning to America and beginning an ill-fated law career a year later, he never played professional chess again, and 25 years later, died suddenly in his New Orleans home. His choice to leave the game that brought him such prominence resulted in his nickname: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess.

Follow Durham Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald onTwitteror send an email totmcdonald@indyweek.com.

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A Triangle Filmmaker Trains His Lens on the Story of a Chess Prodigy and a Career Cut Short - INDY Week