The Queen’s Gambit

Wednesday

Zoe Strimpel

The queen of chess makes her next move

When a young male friend offered to teach me chess last summer, I thought it sounded an exotic thing to learn at forty — and a feminist itch made me want to prove I could hold my own against the dorky boys. Perhaps one day — for the moment I am still pretty hopeless. Radical gender imbalance continues to characterize the chess landscape. Gender ratios are slowly shifting among children as old beliefs about cognitive preference and ability are proved wrong, but top-level chess is still heavily male-dominated. At the very top, it is all male: there is only one woman in the top 120, Hou Yifan of China, ranked 115th.

polgár

Wednesday

Christopher Sandford

Chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer’s fall from grace

“Paradoxes arise within an individual in proportion to their growing status or fame,” the author Stewart Stafford reminds us. Whether it’s the sexual peccadilloes of Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, Lance Armstrong’s relaxed approach to his diet, or the apparent reluctance of certain well-known television performers to overdo it when it comes to wearing trousers in the green room, for many of our celebrities it seems that personal license is the rule and sustained self-restraint the exception.

bobby fischer

Tuesday

James Delingpole

Pawn show

I’m thrilled to tell you that my latest novel has been optioned by Netflix. Grand Prix Grandpa is the inspirational story of an ordinary journalist in his mid-fifties who reboots his life by becoming a world motor-racing champion. It’s tough at first driving round racetracks at 230 mph when your eyesight is going and your reflexes aren’t what they were. But with a little practice and a lot of determination, Grand Prix Grandpa — whose name is James, by the way — becomes F1 champion, then triumphs heroically over the resulting problems: semi-naked women hurling themselves at him; having so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it; the loneliness of tax exile in Monaco, etc. No, not really.

Friday

Samantha Rea

How to play chess like Beth from The Queen’s Gambit

‘Oh you can definitely learn it as a mere mortal. Nobody’s born knowing how to move a knight!’ After watching Netflix phenomenon The Queen’s Gambit, I am picking the brains of Jennifer Shahade, the two-time US women’s chess champ. I’m relieved by Shahade’s assurance that there’s no need to be naturally gifted, but with Queen’s Gambit Beth starting at the age of nine, am I too old to learn? ‘No way! Older learners catch onto certain things more quickly, and they appreciate the beauty of chess,’ says Shahade, who learnt it while most of us were still eating mash via imaginary airplanes. With chess set sales surging by 1,000 percent, I’m not the only one inspired by the series.

Wednesday

Krish Kandiah

There’s more to The Queen’s Gambit than chess

If this Christmas you hear the distant rumble of dusty games’ compendia being brought down out of attics, it’s safe to say you can blame Netflix’s latest smash hit series The Queen’s Gambit, which seems to be convincing everyone that chess can be cool. App stores are reporting a surge of searches for a game first brought to England 10 centuries ago by Vikings. Set in the 1950s, The Queen’s Gambit tells the story of Beth Harmon (played brilliantly by Isla Johnstone and Anya Taylor-Joy). Aged eight, she survives a fatal car crash only to end up in an orphanage.

The Queen’s Gambit