The Queen’s Gambit — The Price of Genius
By: Christian Behler
Tags: TV Series, Television, Chess, Netflix, Culture

The Queen’s Gambit — The Price of Genius

The Netflix drama series shows the struggles of an orphan on her way to become the best chess player in the world

Image from imdb.com.

As I was scrolling through Netflix, a new thumbnail caught my eye: A beautiful woman sitting behind a chessboard. This had me intrigued. I love chess and as it so happens beautiful women. I started watching and got immediately hooked.

The Queen’s Gambit follows the life and career of Beth Harmon, an orphan turned chess prodigy. She struggles with substance abuse on her way to becoming the best chess player in the world.

Based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, the fictional story plays in the 60s and manages to capture the emotional struggles of the main character, brilliantly played by Anya Taylor-Joy.

Orphan Turns Chess Prodigy

The story begins with a brief glimpse of the future. The main protagonist waking up in a bathtub in a hotel room, hungover, rushing to get dressed. She overslept and is late for her very important chess match.

Then the story goes back to the beginning. A young girl is saved from the wreckage of a car. Her mother is dead and the orphaned girl is brought to an orphanage.

The children are given tranquilizers to keep them calm. The start of a long struggle with substance abuse.

When young Beth sees the janitor play chess she gets curious and gets him to teach her the game. She becomes obsessed and shortly after completely obliterates him on the board.

Under the influence of the drugs, she plays chess games in her head and quickly becomes a prodigy, who wins against multiple older players of the local high school.

As the story continues, she improves her game even more and gets to local, national, and international championships. At the same time, her problems with alcohol and drug abuse are also getting worse.

Will she be able to overcome her struggles and win it all?

The Price of Genius

The show manages to convey the high price of genius many artists and successful people suffer from. Whether it is Van Gogh cutting off his own ear, Picasso drinking absinthe, or countless other examples, great talent in one area often comes with struggles in others. Or as it is in Spiderman: With great power comes great responsibility.

A young woman of barely 20 from a less than optimal background suddenly comes into the spotlight of international chess. Even beyond that, the hopes and ambitions of the west in the cold war are on her small shoulders when she plays against the much older and much more experienced player from the Soviet Union.

It’s no wonder that she turns to drugs and drinking to cloud her mind and escape the pressure. She refuses help from others and her relationships are struggling.

Maybe not to this extreme, but many viewers will have had situations in their lives that they can relate to Beth’s struggles, which makes the show so much more captivating to watch.

Small World

So I was watching the show and really got into it. Well written, great actors, and good filmmaking. My brother studies film and gets even more nerded out by good series than I do, so I asked him whether he had seen the show.

He replied “Not yet, only the parts that I am in”.

As it turned out, he was an extra in the show, playing a chess player in the Las Vegas casino scenes. I never would have guessed that. It’s an American production and plays mostly in America, but apparently, some parts of it were shot in Berlin.

It’s a small world sometimes.