Counting every move

After decades, I reread Walter Tevis’ The Queen’s Gambit. My memories were accurate. Written in staccato sentences, the book depicts life from the point of view of a disturbed young girl with genius-level talent at one specific activity.

As an eight-year-old in small town Kentucky, Beth Harmon discovers she is a gifted chessplayer and like so many others, she gets obsessive long before she learns much about the game. Beth’s orphaned; addicted to prescription drugs; asocial; her foster-mother also has addiction issues and her foster-father abandoned them. Mom sees daughter as a ticket to financial security.

Tevis wasn’t an adolescent girl. But he was a decent writer, and a middling chessplayer. By all accounts, he’d also paid his dues when it came to addiction. The Netflix serial is fantastic. It is a rare example of an onscreen adaptation that lives up to, and transcends, the book.

TQG has a luminously talented cast led by Anya Taylor-Joy, and they hired Garry Kasparov as a consultant. Every one of the onscreen game positions is for real, though nerds will experience a pang of regret Kasparov did not pick some of the games of real-life prodigy, Judit Polgar.

For a chessplayer of my generation (I’m a year older than Kasparov), seeing that milieu onscreen was a journey into nostalgia. For current world champion Magnus Carlsen and his peers of the mid-20s generation, TQG looks like a historical docudrama from a forgotten era. The setting is as quaint and alien to them as a 19th century tea-clipper would be to a 21st century astronaut.

TQG is set in the 1950s-1960s. Kasparov’s journey to stardom started in the late-1970s. The tournament milieu remained much the same between 1950-1990. After that it changed, rapidly. Technology has brought change to tennis, cricket, golf, pole vaulting, football, running, you name it. But the change has rarely been so complete, and so near-instantaneous as in chess.

In the 1980s, we played serious tournaments at time controls of 150 minutes for 40 moves, followed by adjournments, and follow-up sessions at 16 moves per hour.  The halls were filled with tobacco smoke (also smoke from biris, and substances other than tobacco). Pulling an all-nighter to analyse a complicated adjournment was normal. It’s been vividly described by many players in many game collections.

By 1990, we were often playing at 25 minutes for the entire game. By 1995, we were using electronic clocks with incremental controls to add back seconds on every move. No adjournments, and no smoking either!

In the 1980s, chessplayers fought to get hold of months-old copies of the bi-annual Informant (The Yugoslav chess bible) and Shakmatny (the Soviet monthly) with “recent” games. By the mid-1990s, we were downloading games within minutes of the scoresheets being signed. Now, we watch games real-time, along with silicon analytical help that makes mincemeat out of humans.

A free chess engine loaded onto a cheap smartphone can be coupled to a multi-million game database to become a force-multiplier unimaginable even in 2000. Popular time-controls include bullet (60 seconds/game with an increment of 1 second/move added back for wimps), or the more leisurely blitz, (3 minutes/game with 2 second increment/ move). Speed makes it harder to cheat. Grandmasters comment (often sensibly) real-time, while playing “banter blitz”.

This transition has worked in keeping a millennia-old game alive. Chess is more popular than ever with Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura having a million-plus subscribers on his Twitch channel.  The online portal, LiChess, (one of the top three, along with Chess.com and Playchess) published a graph that showed its peak visitors per day jumped from 80,000-plus to nearly 110,000 after the release of TQG.

On October 8, Magnus Carlsen listed his company, Play Magnus Group on the Oslo Stock Exchange.  It trades at a valuation of about $100 million. The $30 million it raised will be used for “further growth and technology development” of chess. Netflix isn’t a shareholder in Play Magnus as far as I know, but it’s made a vital contribution to the future of that company and more broadly, to the royal game itself.