Does the Queen's Gambit Accurately Represent the Chess World?

just downloaded e1%2

If you look closely at the piece of, actually issue of chess review that she stole, the name of Panov was on it, small details like that are wonderful.

i dont know 

i dont watch it, theres drugs, addiction, sex, and cusses

Yeah because that is what a chess show normally has

@MaxBarnes calm down man

true

I think The Queen's Gambit is one of the best fictional depictions of chess I've seen. 

That said, what fun is being all positive?  Here are my criticisms:
(lots of spoilers, so if you haven't finished the series, read at your own risk)

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--Beth never draws a game.
--Beth never loses a game, except to her biggest rival of the moment.
--I don't recall how the USCF rating system worked in 1963 (it wasn't the current one), but I'm pretty sure that Beth should have had a much higher rating than 1800 after sweeping her first tournament, in which she beat a 2150 and some other players above 1800.
--I seem to remember the boards in Las Vegas being out in the hallways and open spaces, where guests could routinely walk by and it would be generally noisy, rather than in an actual room (a hotel ballroom, say).  I've never seen that in a tournament.
--I can't take credit for noticing this, but in Beth's game against Benny in Las Vegas, Beth plays the Open Sicilian, with 3. d4, yet she has a pawn on d2 late in the game.
--A few weeks after Benny wipes Beth out at speed chess, Beth wipes out Benny and two other strong players in a blitz simul.  There's improving dramatically, and then there's flat-out unrealistic.
--In the last game of that blitz simul, Benny loses the opera house game.  Even if we assume that's not an extremely well-known classic game in the world of The Queen's Gambit, it has some poor moves as early as move 3 that I can't see Benny making.  (I have an alternative game in mind here: Fischer vs. Fine, 1963 -- it's even an actual offhand blitz game.  The opera house game deserves to be somewhere -- maybe on another board in this scene?)
--In the final round at Moscow, only Beth and Borgov are present.  (I understand wanting that one-on-one drama, but you could still have this legitimately after the adjournment: it's the last round and it's quite possible no one else adjourned.  You could even build up to it a bit more, with the other competitors leaving the room one by one as Beth and Borgov fight on.)
--In general, I would have liked to see a bit more of some of the critical games (in particular, Beth vs. Benny at the US championship -- I had way too much fun pausing the video to try to work out which games were being used.)
--I wish they'd spent some more time on Beth's recovery between Paris and Moscow.  In the book, she loses her first game to a much weaker player at a smaller tournament (don't have the book to hand -- maybe another Kentucky state championship?), drops out, and is afraid she's destroyed whatever in her brain allows her to play top-level chess.  (That's where the line about "feeling like I've erased myself" comes from.)  They show Beth playing squash with Jolene, but in the book, there's more to it -- Jolene helps Beth get into good physical shape and it explicitly pays off in Moscow.  (I've explained to enough people how physically exhausting thinking hard for 4+ hours is -- especially when you then do it again and again for several days -- to want to see this dramatized.)  I think there could have been another episode here -- between Adjournment and Endgame, Analysis.
-- Borgov hugging Beth is a bit much.  Handing her his king and applauding -- that's fine.  Famously, Spassky applauded Fischer's Game 6 victory in their world championship match.

That said, none of these took away too much from my enjoyment.  Now some less-mentioned good things about the series:
-- I'm not the first to say the choice of games was exceptional, but it was.  Reti vs. Tartakover in the basement is one.
-- I had way too much fun pausing to study the positions and try to figure out where they came from.  The finish to Beth's game against Townes is great -- took me a while to realize the rook was trapped!  Anyone else catch the moment when two of Larsen's games (both of which he lost) were on screen at the same time?
-- I'm fine with having the players talk more than they actually would in a chess tournament.  It's hard to show what they are thinking otherwise, except by having them narrate their thoughts rather than speaking them.  I'm not sure this would have worked.  (In, say, Hikaru no Go, it worked very well, but anime and live drama are very different.)
-- The competitive tension that any tournament chess player knows was captured very well.
-- Beth rebuffing facile psychoanalysis of chess.  "They're just pieces."
-- The lack of modern-day politics, to the confusion of right wingers who assume it must be present because a woman is succeeding at something male-dominated, as well as left wingers who think more, say, black and LGBT characters should have been inserted and focused on, even though the setting didn't justify it.
-- Overall, the show stuck to the book very well.

I hope to see more high-quality dramatizations of chess in the future, now that The Queen's Gambit has shown how successful they can be.

that was long... but SUPER ACCURATE! Thanks for chiming in, that's pretty cool

(unfortunately, I didn't read all of it. I hope you can forgive me this time )

I loved it.  I am age 79 and lived at the time. 

Sex, drugs, and hanging your queen so Harmon can back rank mate you at move 12.

I thought it was a pretty good representation.  A lot of things have been mentioned, but there are two that I didn't see mentioned:

- Both times her opponent lets her choose a hand holding a piece, she reaches across and picks the opponent's right hand, getting white.  Most people just reach forward with the right hand and picks the opponent's left hand, so smart opponents put the black pawn in their left hand and the white pawn in the right.  Beth outsmarts them both times.

- I think in tournament play at the time most people wrote their move down before making the move and hitting the clock, the only, and very minor, inaccuracy I noticed.

The nonchess representation of the 1960s was pretty good too, except that the CIA handler would never have driven off when Beth got out to walk; he would have followed at a discreet distance.

Edit:  also, there's an old chess joke, maybe from the 1960s, about people with eyes set wide apart playing on the sides, and people with eyes set close together playing in the center.  I was wondering if they were thinking about this when casting Beth with an actress with notably wide set eyes, and casting one of the other players with an actor with narrow set eyes.

Knocking the king down to signal defeat added poetic drama to the show for those not familiar to chess. 

I THINK BETH LOST 4 TIMES IN THE SERIES NOT COUNTING THE BLITZ GAMES,

1. SCHOLARS MATE

2. WHEN SHE LOST HER QUEEN

3. TO RUSSIAN CHAMP IN  MEXICO

4. TO BENNY

I never usually watch a series, especially anything fictional but watched a couple of episodes as it was about chess. I got bored after about two episodes, not worth watching just for the chess content.

I assumed that last one was a deliberate setup by the Russians to try to get Beth, presumably known to them to be an alcoholic at this point, to break her sobriety.