The grand chess seduction

The game that has long been a boon in Her Majesty’s Prisons was the solace of lockdown captives all over the world in 2020. Membership of Chess.com saw a 200 per cent increase since the first lockdown. But The Queen’s Gambit, the Netflix series in which chess prodigy Beth Harmon plays her way from a Kentucky orphanage to beat the world champion in Moscow, caused a record-smashing number surge of 2.5 million, still rising, with a 15 per cent increase in women’s membership. Beth’s victories over snooty men who think chess belongs to them are the dream of every female chess player, but the reality is at present there is still a sizeable gap between the top men and the top women players. 

Those men still treasure the idea that there’s a ceiling beyond which female talent cannot go. The Queen’s Gambit shows us what to do with ceilings: stare at them long and hard like a demented alien and your next 20 moves will be lit up there by magic – red hair and designer clothes also help. Men love the show too. They enjoy pointing out on chess forums that Beth Harmon’s grumpily obsessive and introverted character is modeled on Bobbie Fischer – the man who said “girls are terrible at chess”. Harmon’s games in the Netflix drama were faithfully recreated from the games of male world champions. The real Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen were or are household names, while in contrast the fictitious Beth Harmon has become the ultimate designator of female chess genius. 

Now women champions are asked what it’s like to be the “real Beth Harmon”. Could this be an own goal for women’s chess? Maybe not, after all – because the real women champions, with all their beauty, exuberance and forgiving good humour, are swinging into view like never before: Judit Polgar, best woman player of all time, who broke every ceiling with never an upward glance; Hou Yifan, the Chinese top-rated woman chess player in the world right now; the wacky whooping Botez sisters, Alexandra and Andrea, who do rap and work-outs in between chess moves; the bubbly chess broadcaster Anna Rudolf, currently live-streaming her duels with the new Beth Bot; the UK women’s champion Jovanka Houska, who co-authored a novel, The Mating Game, about a woman who can’t fall in love with a man unless he can beat her at chess; or US champion Jennifer Shahade, author of Chess Bitch and Play it like a girl!, who’s played “simuls” against 50 players at once — while shimmying a hula-hoop. Shahade also filmed herself thrashing (metaphorically) a naked male player, in an inversion of the iconic 1963 photo in which Marcel Duchamp, the pioneer of conceptual art, plays chess with a naked woman. These rockstar girl champs have been blowing gales of fresh air through the male preserve of competition chess, where disparagement of women is even more in evidence than the Netflix drama would suggest. Female masters have long maintained that only when women and men play in equal numbers can we talk about ceilings, not before.

Chess wasn’t always a man’s game. With the rise of queen power in the 10th century, the Grand Vizier of traditional Arab chess morphed into the European chess Queen. Royal brides like Adelaide of Burgundy and her daughter-in-law, Theophano of Byzantium, arrived at foreign courts with chess sets in their trousseaux and both became powerful regents on behalf of underage sons. Wellborn women were expected to be good chess-players. Newly-weds with no shared language could break the ice with a game of chess. In paintings a chessboard between a man and woman was like a winged Cupid hovering over their shoulders. Love and War – Venus and Mars, as Lucretius said, are the prime movers of the universe. Chess was a metaphor of erotic conquest. Kings and princes enjoyed being beaten by women at chess. The caliphs of Cordoba paid through the nose for slave girls who could play the lute and outwit them on the chess board. It became a symbol too of conjugal companionship. Special sets were designed for women to play when lying-in after childbirth.

Later chess-playing queens, like Eleanor of Aquitaine who went on crusade, Isabella of Castile who galloped round Spain slaying Moors, and Catherine de Medici, who liked to drop her enemies through trap doors into the Seine, must have inspired the chess queen’s metamorphosis into the most dangerous piece on the board. The new “Queen’s chess” of the Renaissance, commonly known as alla rabiosa or esches de la dame enragée had more dash than the earlier game, but at this point men began to get the wind up. In 1534, Gratien du Pont designed a chess set with rude epithets for women inscribed on each square of the board. There was something in the chess queen for everybody: for love-struck men she was Venus; for chess-crazed monks she was the Virgin, Queen of Heaven; for misogynistic men she was a Virago, bristling with toxic femininity. By the 17th century men played chess in clubs where women couldn’t go. The development of chess as a competitive sport with professional players completed their banishment.

There’s so much more to chess, though, than the tense clock-thumping world of competitions. I grew up with chess boards all around me. The convivial chess board, along with black coffee and cigarettes, was a staple of the 1960s bohemian scene my parents belonged to. I play now more than ever, and though merely a “casual” player, the obsession is strong. When my car conks out in busy traffic, I make a couple of sneaky moves on my phone before ringing roadside rescue. You can always calm yourself in a sticky situation by figuring out a chess move. It’s better than lighting up a fag. I’ve boasted excessively of my meagre victories – a friend once called me “the girl who likes to beat the shit out of men at chess”. Being underestimated concentrates the mind and even a low grade untutored female can land a blow on a smug little weasel who knows the name of all his moves and thinks she’s mincemeat. 

If you want to test out a man’s feminist credentials try beating him at chess. One man I played, a six-footer, went purple and fidgety – grabbing cushions to prop himself higher as if an even more commanding view of the board would help. Another vanquished hero threw money in my face like Alfredo in La Traviata. Old French epics suggest that chessboards regularly became murder weapons and chess pieces flew like missiles. A London player in the 13th century ran a sword through his female opponent.

Keen not to die by violence or lose more friends, I prefer now to play online against unseen adversaries. And much as I approve of higher girl numbers, I have to say it’s not often a white-haired divorcée gets to feel like a rare bird and have a bunch of chaps hang upon her every move. In the shadowy online world of Chess.com I dole out death to Killer9222, Gforce_1 and Fischersnightmare and I’m spared the sight of their embarrassment. I play 24-hour chess, four or five games on the go, firmly ignoring the blitz and bullet options. One day I dealt out three checkmates in three consecutive moves – if anyone had told me twenty years ago I could stare thoughtfully at a mobile phone and feel like Lara Croft, I wouldn’t have believed it. On the field of combat my name is Sophonisba, a Carthaginian princess who fell foul of the Roman republic. For my tiny profile picture I studied the old-master paintings of my bare-breasted namesake swooning voluptuously over a cup of poison. They didn’t strike me as giving out the right message. But then I hit upon a painting by Sofonisba de Anguissola of her younger sisters playing chess in 1555. I cropped out the youngest, a pale stern beauty in black velvet, with braided hair and her right arm raised in benediction over the chess board. Who wouldn’t want to be beaten by this lovely creature? 

I flesh out my ghostly opponents: the guy with the comic strip avatar and the swaggering name is a scruffy loser in a Texas bedsit; the Norwegian meets me for furtive trysts under the table at board meetings; the Frenchman gets hell from his girlfriend for playing me in the bedroom – if she could, she’d glue his pieces to the board like the newly-wed Madame Duchamp. As for that vodka-swilling Russian wife-beater, he’s toast. The player in New South Wales – and this is true because we took to chatting – turns out to be a professional snake catcher who ardently admires Roger Scruton, listens to plainchant, and talks in chivalric French about his gallant knights and foot-soldiers. 

This congress with strangers is a thrill. The tock of my chess move on a man’s phone, perhaps a little vibration in his trouser pocket, will divert him from his business onto those 64 magical squares where we suffer siege, slaughter and grinding attrition, but all other cares melt away. After the slow, cautious foreplay, the “book-moves”, we set sail on the ocean of infinite possibilities. It may last days or even weeks. I get to learn his sleeping habits, and whether he works or idles during the day. Some games are so astonishing that their geometric beauty lingers long in your head. At a certain point the pace quickens and the phone goes red hot: tock, tock, tock – each of us striving with every sinew towards le petit mort. “On the point of being mated he felt himself shudder and shiver” – I quote from the Le livre des Echecs Amoureux Moralisés circa 1400. Is it better than sex? It all depends on the position.

My plan for the post-Covid “reset” is a chess revolution. A few years back we saw pianos and ping pong tables appear in public places. Let’s line the streets, cafés, shopping precincts, youth clubs and stations with chessboards and giant cutouts of chess queens past and present. Bring on the Beth Harmon Barbie doll. Let the hula-hooping “chess bitches” weave the eroticism of chess back into our culture. It was the unshackling of the Queen from her one-square limitation, with her shades of Virago, Venus and the Holy Virgin that made chess what it is. Eleanor of Aquitaine grew up with chess and love songs at the Provençal court. We could do with some of that sexy troubadour vibe: beguilement, panache, cool calculation and killing as a fine art instead of murder on the streets. The best game is played by a crackling fire with a glass of port. It is, as Jenny Shahade has said, “a form of meditation” – a way to take in the pleasure of being where you are and, if you’re lucky, who you’re with.

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