When you think of a series about competition, what comes to mind? Possibly sports, maybe a singing show? You likely wouldn’t think about chess, however, Netflix’s miniseries The Queen's Gambit has become the highest watched miniseries on the platform as of its initial release in October of 2020. Chess is often seen as a game of patience and strategy but The Queen’s Gambit shows all the drama and high stakes of the chess world through the eyes of Beth Harmon, a young chess prodigy with a rough past.

Based on the novel by Walter Tevis, Harmon, played by the striking Anya Taylor-Joy, is an 50’s orphan who learns chess and begins to enter competitions after she is adopted by a lonely housewife and her absent husband. Beth becomes the Kentucky State Champion and travels around the world, checkmating grandmasters left and right while struggling with codependency to drugs and alcohol that she developed at the orphanage. She struggles with loss and trauma as the audience watches her fall in and out of addiction.

In the end, despite losing practically everything Beth cares about, she wins the championship in Russia and beats Borgov, the one grandmaster who was holding her back. Beth is a self-destructive genius as the only thing holding her back is herself and unresolved childhood trauma. From age 8, she was force-fed tranquilizers, a common practice in the 1950s, to calm her down. Ultimately she feels she needs the pills to not only stabilize her mood but to win chess tournaments as the pills grant her the ability to hallucinate chess games and strategies in her mind. Throughout the miniseries, Beth deals with the ups and downs of being the only woman in male-dominated space. When Beth is interviewed for LIFE Magazine, the reporter only focuses on the fact that she is a girl who plays competitive chess and not her accomplishments. Harmon is constantly under scrutiny and watched by other male players and reporters. Beth refuses to let anyone define her accomplishments as a woman, but rather, wants to be seen as one of the world's best chess players.

Chess is historically a male-dominated sphere. While most competitions are open to all, men tend to take up most of the space. With chess being a game of mathematics, physics, and engineering, women and girls are much less likely to be encouraged to pick up a hobby like chess. Beth Harmon was extremely lucky to be able to learn chess under her circumstances, but most real-life people are not. Men in chess have also been known to discriminatory against the women who do join. For example, former World Championship winner Nigel Short claimed that men are “biologically superior” to women in chess. Bobby Fischer, who is ironically one of the inspirations for Beth’s character, claimed that women are “terrible chess players” and belong in the house. While these comments are seriously unfortunate to hear, they have not stopped women like character Beth Harmon to rise to the top of the chess sphere.

Right now out of the 1,600 international grandmasters, 37 of them are women, many of them being in the last 20 years. The current highest-ranking female chess player is Chinese grandmaster, Hou Yifan. Yifan is a four time winning Women’s World Chess Champion with a ranking of 2686. Judit Polgar, a retired Hungarian grandmaster, is known as one of the strongest female chess players there is. With a ranking of 2735, she is the youngest person to ever become a Grandmaster, actually beating misogynist Bobby Fischer from that title. Polgar has been the only woman to ever compete in the World Chess Championship. Other female competitors, such as Ju Wenjun have won the Women's Chinese Chess Championship in 2010 and 2014. And Aleksandra Goryachkina, the highest rated female chess player in Russia with a ranking of 2593.

While chess to some might seem like a difficult hobby, to many it is a life and career. More and more people are recognizing this phenomenon by watching shows like The Queen’s Gambit. While there is still a lot of sexism and discrimination in the chess world, shows like this works to combat negative stereotypes and include more diversity in sports like chess. Luckily, with the rate it’s at, sexism in the chess world will be checkmated and forced to resign.

The Queen's Gambit and Sexism in Chess