The Queen’s Gambit has all the makings of a true story—a scrappy, once-in-a-generation prodigy, a meteoric rise from orphanage rags to designer riches, a globe-trotting historical setting, and a stunning triumph over adversity. But if you’re looking to Beth Harmon, the brilliant chess champion at the heart of the series, and hoping to find her real-life counterpart, you can expect to come up short. As it turns out, there’s no real-life Beth Harmon, by that name or another name.
That said, the show isn’t entirely imagined. Based on the same-titled 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, an American novelist and passionate amateur chess enthusiast, The Queen’s Gambit draws inspiration from the insular world of competitive chess, circa the 1950s and 1960s. That also explains why the search for a season two is fruitless. Though Beth herself is fictional, Tevis was inspired by the extraordinary talents of Grandmasters Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky, and Anatoly Karpov, whose chess games he described as “a source of delight to players like myself for years.”
Tevis sketched the character of Beth with an eye toward the remarkable accomplishments of the era’s most notable Grandmasters, but he also looked inward, informing her battle with drug addiction through elements of his own story, telling The New York Times, "I was born in San Francisco. When I was young, I was diagnosed as having a rheumatic heart and given heavy drug doses in a hospital. That's where Beth's drug dependency comes from in the novel. Writing about her was purgative. There was some pain—I did a lot of dreaming while writing that part of the story. But artistically, I didn't allow myself to be self-indulgent."
While Beth herself is a fictional character, the unforgettable games she plays are not. Many are based on real-life competitions, like the match in which she defeats Harry Beltik for the Kentucky State Champion title, which is derived from a 1955 game played in Riga, Latvia. The final showdown of the series, in which she faces off against Russian champion Vasily Borgov, was played in Biel, Switzerland in 1993. Among the most surprising real life matches pulled into the series is Beth’s final game of speed chess against Benny Watts, which was played at the Paris Opera in 1858.
To ensure the verisimilitude of these games and this insular world, The Queen’s Gambit worked with Bruce Pandolfini, a chess champion largely considered to be the United States’ most distinguished teacher of chess. Pandolfini coached numerous champions to prominence during the 20th century, making him the perfect choice to teach cast members how to play the game. Through Pandolfini, the show was able to consult with Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players of all time and a former child prodigy himself.
“[Kasparov] had so much to give on a personal level about what it’s like to be seven or ten years old and a genius, taken out of regular circ*mstances and having your life changed—family dynamics, the KGB, going to tournaments,” said executive producer William Holberg. “That was gold for us.”
Though Beth herself may not be real, her uphill battle against the sexism inherent in the world of competitive chess is all too accurate. Early in the series, we see tournament organizers sneer at a teenage Beth, attempting to dissuade her from competing. In her first match at the Kentucky State Championship, Beth is pitted against the only other female competitor, who explains that women must compete against one another before they are allowed to compete against men. This sexist attitude was ubiquitous at the time, reaching even and especially the upper echelons of the sport, with chess’s leading luminaries insisting that women would never scale the same heights as men. In a 1963 interview, Fischer said that female players were “terrible,” with the likely explanation being that “they are not so smart.” In 1966, the U.S. Women’s Championship prize was $600, while the male victor of the U.S. Championship was paid ten times that sum at $6000. To this day, that pay disparity remains unchanged, with male champions continuing to take home ten times the prize money awarded to women.
Until the 1986 World Chess Championship, when Susan Polgar fought to qualify and to remove the word “men’s” from the title, the championship was open only to male competitors. More than three decades later, only one woman has ever competed for the championship title: Judit Polgar, widely considered the best female player ever to play the game, who, in 2005, competed valiantly but failed to take the top prize.
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To this day, competitive chess remains largely segregated by gender, with women disproportionately outnumbered everywhere from the world stage to high school chess clubs. As recently as 2018, just 14 percent of US Chess Federation players were women—which may seem a low number, but was in fact a record high. Jennifer Shahade, a two-time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion and the women’s program director at the U.S. Chess Federation, sees a bright future for women in chess, albeit one threatened by a familiar strain of sexism.
“There’s that combination of getting lots of positive attention and opportunities because you’re one of the few females in the game, whereas there’s also the negativity of trolls and scrutiny and overall questioning of whether girls and women belong,” Shahade said. “I think there are two parts to the world. [One] part is very excited to see girls and women play. And then there’s also some undercurrents of resentment. Especially as chess moves online, there are a lot of nasty comments written about girls and women.”
Though The Queen’s Gambit doesn’t pull punches in depicting Beth’s struggles to overcome the sport’s inherent sexism, it also posits that a female champion could be embraced around the world, with Beth beloved by passionate fans everywhere from Paris to Moscow. In writing the novel, Tevis envisioned a brighter future for chess, one where respect could be afforded to female players and equality could rule the day.
“I consider The Queen's Gambit a tribute to brainy women,” Tevis said. “I like Beth for her bravery and intelligence. In the past, many women have had to hide their brains, but not today.''
Beth’s story may be a fiction, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t real women taking up her mandate to dominate the sport. In fact, there are currently 37 women ranked as Grandmasters, and there’s no telling how many more are in the making. Sure, there’s no “real Beth Harmon” now, but likely she’s out there—maybe even training in an orphanage basem*nt with a janitor, just preparing to knock everyone out.
