The Queen’s Gambit

A worldwide cultural phenomenon

When Netflix released The Queen’s Gambit in October 2020, in the midst of global lockdown, nobody anticipated the scale of the tidal wave. In 28 days, the series was watched by 62 million households worldwide — a record for a miniseries. It became the most-watched scripted miniseries in the platform’s history at that time.

The impact on the real world of chess was immediate and measurable. Sales of chess sets soared by 87% in the United States. Chess.com recorded millions of new sign-ups. YouTube opening tutorials gained hundreds of thousands of views. A generation that had known chess only from a distance rediscovered the game of kings through the eyes of a fictional heroine.

Beth Harmon: a fictional character, real inspirations

Beth Harmon, the red-haired, green-eyed heroine played by Anya Taylor-Joy, is a fictional character from Walter Tevis’s novel of the same name, published in 1983. Tevis, himself an amateur chess player, built Beth from several influences: Bobby Fischer for the solitary genius and meteoric rise, Vera Menchik for the gender dimension (the first women’s world champion, from 1927 until her death in 1944), and his own experience as an alcoholic in recovery for the dimension of addiction.

The authenticity of the games: the consultants’ work

The series benefited from the advice of Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini, the famous American coach. Their mission was twofold: to make the games authentically credible for those in the know, and to make them visually dramatic for newcomers.

Most of the positions shown on screen are real and playable. Several games in the series are directly inspired by real historical games. The final game against Vasily Borgov largely follows a real game, Ivanchuk–Wolff (Biel, 1993), and Beth, with White, opens it with the Queen’s Gambit, consistent with top-level practice in the 1960s.

Kasparov himself stated that the chess scenes were the most authentic he had seen in a film or series, which is a considerable compliment from one of the greatest champions in history.

The portrayal of the Soviet Union

The series depicts the USSR as a machine for producing champions: players trained in teams, backed by the state, sharing their analyses with one another in the collective interest. This portrayal is historically accurate. Between 1948 and 1972, all the world chess champions were Soviet, and the system of collective preparation was an institutional reality.

The final episode, in which the Soviet players join forces to help Beth prepare for her match against Borgov, plays on this reality in reverse, to dramatically effective ends. In real life, Fischer in 1962, after the Candidates tournament in Curaçao, had precisely denounced this Soviet solidarity as a form of organised cheating.

The impact on chess sales

The “Queen’s Gambit” effect on the market for physical chess sets was spectacular and lasting. In France too, sellers reported a sharp rise in sales in 2020, which carried on into 2021. Specialist chess shops such as Le Palais des Echecs saw orders soar for quality, aesthetic sets, with customers seeking to recreate the luxurious atmosphere of the series.

More significant still: the series renewed interest in fine wooden chess sets. Beth plays on beautifully made boards with magnificent pieces — this care for the object struck a chord with an audience that wanted to acquire not just a game, but an object of value and prestige.

The real Queen’s Gambit: the opening behind the series

The series put the term “Queen’s Gambit” into general vocabulary, but few viewers know that the Queen’s Gambit is a real opening, one of the most analysed in history. To find out all about the real opening behind the series’ title, see our full article on the Queen’s Gambit as a chess opening.

In short: the Queen’s Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4) offers a pawn on c4 that Black can accept (Queen’s Gambit Accepted) or decline (Queen’s Gambit Declined). In most variations it is not a true sacrifice — White regains the pawn easily — but it creates tense structures in which White exerts lasting positional pressure.

What the series doesn’t teach about chess

Despite its relative authenticity, the series conveys a few misconceptions about top-level chess. The image of a solitary genius who learns alone, without a coach, in a tenth of the time anyone else would need, does not match the reality of how today’s great champions develop. Contemporary elite players work with whole teams, use analysis engines, and study tens of thousands of games.

The dramatisation of the games — in which every move is a visual revelation — also underestimates the deeply cerebral and invisible side of real top-level battles, where hours go by with nothing seeming to happen on the board, while mental architectures of extraordinary complexity are being built in the players’ heads.

The legacy of the series: a new generation of players

Six years after its release, The Queen’s Gambit remains a cultural reference that people cite when chess comes up. Millions of people who watched the series at least tried to learn the game. Even if only a tiny fraction became regular players, the net impact on the worldwide community is positive and measurable.

To deepen your knowledge of the world that inspired the series, dive into the great history of chess or explore the biography of Bobby Fischer, the real American genius who dominated the Soviets and whose story resembles Beth Harmon’s in many ways.