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My father who is pretty good at chess tried to teach me when I was a girl. I was uninterested, while my brother stuck with it and became rather good himself. Flash forward 30 odd years to a few weeks ago, when a young man suggested we play. Suddenly, chess seemed fresh and exotic, and an opportunity to put one in the eye of boys who think girls cant do it. After all, I am one of millions who had binge watched Netflix's The Queens Gambit in 2020 and found that it gave being good at chess a gleam equal parts feminist and sexy. The only thing was that I needed to be taught from scratch. The young man showed me the basics, and off we went. Sort of.

My chess journey, as they say, has been engrossing and shocking: despite daily games with my father during my August sojourn at my parents' house in Massachusetts, I still get bogged down in complex eventualities that can never come to pass because of crippling blindness about immediate threats (my pawn blindness is one of my worst weaknesses, but it hardly stops there). I rewatched the Queens Gambit to see if I could pinch any moves from fictional world champion Beth Harmon but was repaid by being trounced by a six-year old, himself a beginner.

Ah well. The Queens Gambit was still a great rewatch, its extraordinary power stemming from its fictional prodigy being a girl she starts at 9 and then a beautiful woman before whom the very best male players simply quivered and keeled over, sometimes in tears.

If chess was entirely male dominated in the 60s, when the series takes place, one might have assumed things had improved. Puzzlingly, they don't seem to have much; mystifyingly, girls still play in their own tournaments. Still, I watched with admiration last week as eight-year-old Maksym Kryshtafor, a Ukrainian refugee and chess champion who, with his mother, has been offered refuge for six months by one Paul Townsend, a chess enthusiast from York, trounce all his opponents in a tournament in Durham. Mark Riding, the tournament organiser, compared the young Maksym to a Bobby Fisher: whats going on behind the eyes, its different from the rest of us, he said.

Disconcertingly, however, pictures of the event revealed a room full of boys and men, with nary a female in sight, though one assumes the odd mother hovered round the edges. Some may say there is something quintessentially male about chess's appeal, and about the obsessional excellence that makes for mastery, but I disagree. What is true is that girls are constantly told they are less logical than their male counterparts. Its just a question of when that tired and false canard finds itself well and truly check-mated.

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Chess still finds itself between a rook and a hard place - The Telegraph