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Anya Taylor-Joy plays Beth in the Netflix series The Queen's Gambit. Phil Bray/Netflix hide caption

Anya Taylor-Joy plays Beth in the Netflix series The Queen's Gambit.

The Netflix series The Queen's Gambit follows a chess prodigy named Beth, played Anya Taylor-Joy, from her childhood in an orphanage through her spectacular career in chess. She learns in a basement from a custodian and grows into a champion.

This year's Tiny Desk Contest winner is Linda Diaz, a musician who, as it turns out, is also a chess expert who had a successful professional career in chess for much of her life. We figured there was no one better to talk to about chess, challenges and what the series does and doesn't get right. Below are some excerpts from the conversation; you can listen to the whole thing below. Her bottom line: "I loved it. I watched the whole thing in two days."

This interview is edited for length and clarity.

On the appearance of Beth's first chess teacher, the custodian at her orphanage

A lot of children's first experiences start with a mentor. So their parents, or their older siblings, or a coach. And I think that is what Beth had, even though it wasn't necessarily called that by name. That was her first coach. Sometimes, especially for young girls who are discouraged from playing chess, I think it really does take someone seeing something in you and motivating you to work harder and be your best. That definitely happened to me at a young age. I had a good disposition to play chess, is what my coaches said. I was really quiet, and I could sit for a long period of time. And I was six years old, so that was a big deal. I was the worst chess player on the chess team, like until fourth grade, from kindergarten to fourth grade, which is a long time. And they were like, "Stick with it, keep her in the game." And then in fourth grade, I just blossomed. I won City's. I got second in State, and then I won SuperNationals, all in a row, and that launched my whole chess career. And that just took people really believing in me and motivating me. So, yeah, I think it's incredibly realistic. I really did relate to that relationship that she had with her coach, the custodian.

On being a young woman playing elite chess

In terms of the show and Beth's experience, a lot of that was similar to me, and even worse in some ways. I think the show definitely gets it right that she's critiqued for having these traits about her that men have and are praised for. She plays a Sicilian [defense]; I also used to play the Sicilian. She's an intuitive thinker; I also am an intuitive thinker. And she's really aggressive. And I was also an aggressive player. And so it comes off as "you're impatient," and really it's that you're creative and you're naturally gifted. And so I really saw that in her. I had a lot of people say, you know, you need to study your openings, study your end game, you need to do X, Y, Z, which I probably should have also done. But I did have these gifts that really took specific people to nurture those gifts.

I definitely have a lot of guy friends, obviously from chess. However, my experience was just being completely sexualized, not really respected as a person, even if I was respected as a player in some ways. I was oftentimes the youngest person in a lot of these rooms. I would travel internationally and grown adult men, sometimes with intentions, sometimes just out of ignorance, not knowing how old I was, depending on the age, would just be incredibly inappropriate to me in many ways. Like make me feel stupid, make me feel small, emotionally manipulate me. And I think a lot of women have this same experience. And so it was cool on the show to see Beth be very smart, very on it, having friends who are kind of looking out for her.

On Beth's issues with mental health and addiction to prescription medications

There are all these lines that kind of glorify it in the show, like "genius and madness go hand in hand." But I really believe that's true. You know, people whose brains think differently are often wired a little bit differently. And they're often if you're very emotional, then you're susceptible to certain things, or if you're obsessed with a game, you usually have an addictive personality to go along with it. So, yeah, substance abuse was really common in chess. Especially because a lot of the culture, it being so male-dominated, and also [alcohol] being so much of a lot of individual countries' cultures. Drinking is huge in some tournaments; you can even drink at the board when you're younger and you're around adults who can drink and have, and it's not really an issue. Alcoholism is a big issue for chess players. But also a lot of chess players are on prescribed substances for whatever reason. And so it's really easy to fall into addiction that way. You're playing eight-hour games and then waking up in the morning and doing the same thing. So some people it's just like, you know, self-medication.

On Beth's visions of the chess board on the ceiling

I think it's different for everybody. I'm an audio learner, definitely, but a lot of chess players are visual, especially because one of the biggest aspects of chess is space and time and then your position and things. So any chess player that's going to be on any kind of expert professional level has to be able to visualize the board. But for me, I guess it's second nature. It's kind of like translating. For me it feels like, I'm bilingual in Spanish, you know, I'm thinking something in English. Maybe that's my primary language, but then it's easily translated in Spanish. That's kind of the way that it feels with chess for me. Like, OK, I'm sitting and looking at a position, and I see all of these permutations. And the thing that I visualize isn't a totally different, you know, on-the-ceiling board that comes and speaks to me or anything. But it is a similar concept. I just don't think it's so visually apparent to me because it's like second nature.

On the scenes of fans closely following tournaments in real time

You know, there's live streaming chess and there's a whole Twitch world now. But back then, those scenes of the little boy running out to the crowd outside to tell them what moves she played? And then there's the demonstration board? That's all real. I used to play in tournaments in other countries. ... When I'd be done with my game, I would go and watch the super amazing chess players. But you can't stand next to the world champion. You can't just go up behind his game in the way that you can go behind your friend's game. So they would have giant demonstration boards. ... And then they would have them on a projector outside of the room for people to watch. And then you can comment in real time.

On chess and music

The more I talk about chess and the more I talk about music, I'm realizing that I think of them the same way. ... When I write a song, I'm like: That was right. There was no other way to write it. There was no other option. I'm one hundred percent sure that that's the way it was. And it's kind of the same way of being an intuitive chess player. So I learned a lot from chess, as I said, about the intentionality that you need to succeed in something that you love. And I'm really lucky to have been naturally gifted at chess and naturally gifted as a musician. So both chess and music are things that you can get better at just by practicing. But I learned from chess that even if you are the cream of the crop, whatever, you can't get by without practicing and keeping your mind sharp. And it's all so much muscle memory. And the same thing is true, especially of being a singer. It's muscle memory.

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We Talk 'Queen's Gambit' With Chess Expert And Tiny Desk Winner Linda Diaz - NPR

Mr. Robinson died suddenly on Oct. 13 at age 43, his family said, declining to say more than that he died of natural causes. His death dealt a blow to the citys chess community, where he had remained a fixture and role model, having taught at Mott Hall, a middle school in Harlem (where he won another national championship, as assistant coach, in 1999), and later at Chess NYC, which offers private chess instruction, and at Success Academy, a network of charter schools.

I wish we had more Charus, said Debbie Eastburn, the chief executive of Chess in the Schools, a city nonprofit, for whom Mr. Robinson also taught.

Mr. Robinson is survived by his two sisters, Stacey and Aisha.

The early 90s success of the Rooks, composed of Black, Latino and Asian students, changed chess in New York City. Until then, scholastic chess had been dominated by mostly white players from elite schools such as Dalton, Hunter College High School and Trinity.

There was no clear evidence that chess could be an inner-city sport, said Jerald Times, a self-taught master who is now the chess director at Success Academy. So when these kids showed up, these Raging Rooks, on the front page of The New York Times, it transformed the landscape of how we see inner-city chess.

As many as 90 percent of participants at national tournaments were white at that time, Mr. Times estimated. The proportion of minorities has grown fourfold since, he said, to 40 percent, because of the example of the Raging Rooks and an I.B.M.-funded research study, the Margulies Report, that tied reading performance to playing chess.

Originally posted here:
A Star of the Raging Rooks, He Helped Change the Face of N.Y.C. Chess - The New York Times

Despite the efforts to make the chess scenes believable, there are still areas in which the series comes up short. The most apparent is in how fast the players move during the tournaments. As one tournament director tells Beth before a competition in Cincinnati, each player has two hours to make 40 moves, which was, and still is, a standard time control for such games. But in every match, Beth and her opponents make each of their moves after taking only a few seconds to think about them. At such a tempo, they would finish their games in minutes, not hours. The speed is understandable for filmmaking because watching players sit at a board for hours, barely moving, is not riveting. But it is also not accurate.

Nor is having competitors talk during some of the games. Other than offering a draw essentially agreeing that the match ends in a tie players do not speak to each other during matches. It is not only considered bad sportsmanship, it is also against the rules. But several times, as in Beths game against Harry in Episode 2, in which she gloats near the end, and in her game against a young Russian prodigy in Mexico City in Episode 4, Beth and her opponents engage in verbal exchanges. The dialogue makes the games more understandable and spices up the drama, but once again, it is not true to life.

Though The Queens Gambit is a work of fiction and the characters that appear in it never existed, there are passing references to players who did, among them the world champions Jos Ral Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Botvinnik and Boris Spassky.

There is also a curious moment when Harry compares Beth to Paul Morphy, an American, who played that famous game at the Paris Opera in 1858 and who is widely considered the greatest player of the 19th century. The comparison seems like a misdirection. Despite her self-destructive tendencies, Beth does not resemble Morphy. She is closer to a female version of another champion: Bobby Fischer.

That may not be accidental. Walter Tevis, who wrote the 1983 novel on which the series is based, was a passionate and knowledgeable amateur player. In making the protagonist a woman playing a game that had long been dominated by men and which continues to be today, though no one knows the reason Tevis may have been expressing a hope that one day there might be true equality of the sexes over the board.

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Im a Chess Expert. Heres What The Queens Gambit Gets Right - The New York Times

The fun part of these streams is important for drawing in young fans who could fall in love with a game that develops analytical thinking skills, concentration, and creativity. Part of the magic of the most popular internet streams is watching a genius on the level of Magnus Carlsen playing with and teaching amateurs who themselves already know how to entertain an internet audience.

The internet chess carnival will continue as the official chess organization, FIDE, announced in October it was postponing the in-person Candidates Tournament until next year while COVID-19 continues to surge around the world. The tournament, which determines the challenger to the world champion, started in Russia this March before organizers hurriedly called it off as Russia began shutting down international flights. Now that partially played tournament is delayed at least until spring.

When FIDE first called off the tournament in March, Carlsen created his own online chess tour built around rapid games instead of the usual hourslong classical games of traditional elite chess tournaments. It was a big hit, going so well he decided to do a sequel tour that will start this month. On top of winning all these tournaments during the pandemic, Carlsen is winning in the business of chess: His chess company that centers on online chess, Play Magnus Group, had a $42 million debut on the Oslo Stock Exchange in October.

The online format brought new drama. Chinese player Ding Liren, ranked third globally, had to find technical workarounds to participate in the tournaments because China blocks gaming sites like Chess24, which hosted the Magnus Tour. Ding struggled through regular disconnections and had to play in the wee hours because of time zone differences.

A new online rivalry developed through that tour between Carlsen and one of the top American players, Hikaru Nakamura. Theyve had exciting showdowns during the online tournaments, and Nakamura seemed to be one of the few who could rattle Carlsen. Nakamura is one of the biggest internet chess celebrities, with millions tuning in to his Twitch streams during the pandemic. In September Nakamura became one of the first chess players to sign with an e-sports agency.

He stoked chess interest by training other Twitch stars in chess and then hosting competitions. Like Rainas channel, Nakamuras is fun to watch because it mixes genius brains like his with regular people trying to learn chess. But Nakamura also thinks the quick games online make for better viewing.

Because you have winners and losers, more people will follow it even if they cant necessarily understand what exactly is going on, Nakamura told the gaming news site Kotaku. (By contrast, most high-level classical chess games end in ties.)

Kotaku, the gaming site, worried moving chess online would open the game up to the internets toxicity. But from my hours of watching chess online, I would say that toxicity isnt immediately evident.

From the professional commentary to the banter among players, chess seems to be one of the purer corners of the internet in many ways (if you dont read the comments!). Some moments in online tournaments were almost a mockery of the toxicity of the internet: During one tournament, a blind musician, Oleg Akkuratov, sang and played jazz while the players were thinking between moves.

But one element of toxicity has come up as the game has moved online: cheating. In October, Chess.com issued a lifetime ban on Armenian grandmaster Tigran Petrosian after its fair play team determined he had cheated in an online tournament. His team, the Armenia Eagles, was disqualified after initially beating out the Americans, the Saint Louis Arch Bishops, for a $20,000 prize. Cheating in chess usually means using a computer chess engine to determine best moves.

And speaking of internet toxicity, after the cheating accusation first appeared from American player Wesley So, Petrosian published a long, insulting rant against So. Maybe the culture of streaming platforms will drag chess into this kind of drama, but the current top players are all very likable and not given to brashness.

For example: The top American player and No. 2 in the world, Fabiano Caruana, is soft-spoken and universally acknowledged as a nice guy. He has played in the major online tournaments but said at the first in-person tournament in Norway in October that he wanted to see a balance between online and classical. Right now unfortunately we can only really play online chess.

Whatever the drawbacks of internet culture and rapid chess, the pandemic has brought in a new generation of chess fans. Sometimes that fandom comes at the expense of homework.

In a comment beneath the 1-hour YouTube video featuring Raina and Carlsen, Suryam Agarwal wrote, I dont know anything about chess, I have many assignments left to do, still I watched the whole video.

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The 2020 internet chess carnival | WORLD News Group - WORLD News Group

11/5/2020 A team of scientists from Germany, the Netherlands and the USA studied the development of cognitive abilities in humans and evaluated them using chess games. The result: cognitive skills only increase up to a certain age and today's chess players play better than those of previous generations. | Picture: Pixabay

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A team of scientists from Germany, the Netherlands and the USA researched the development of intelligence by evaluating the results of a total of 24,000 chess games played between 1890 and 2014 with a total of 1.6 million moves.

The scientists wanted to find out whether and how the cognitive abilities developed over the course of the lives of the players in question and how the skills of players from previous generations compare with the skills of today's players.

With the help of computers the scientists evaluated nd compared the quality of the moves and looked for patterns and developments.

The scientists reached the following conclusions:

1. Human cognitive abilities are age-dependent. At first, they continue to increase, but from a certain age, around 35 years, they stagnate.

2. Today, people perform better in chess than people of the same age in earlier generations. The level of play has risen continuously over the course of the study period of almost 125 years.

The results were recently published in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" (PNAS).

However, Professor Sunde, one of the scientists who conducted the study, indicated a weakness of the study, which is that a lot of top players stop playing tournament chess around the age of 50.

Another arguable weakness of the study is the fact that the ability to play good chess is a very special talent. Good chess skills are not necessarily transferable to cognitive performance in other areas. Moreover, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century chess theory was hardly developed. And the computer has dramatically increased the knowledge of chess and improved the level of play in the last 30 years.

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Chess and scientific research - Chessbase News