The Queen's Gambit: Not all chess queens are fictional

Netflix’s new series The Queen’s Gambit, which follows a chess champion named Beth Harmon from her traumatic childhood in an orphanage to the world of prestigious chess tournaments, has proved to be a massive hit.

With the release of the show, eBay is reporting sales of chess sets are up 250%, and the online gaming website chess.com says its number of new registered players has increased fivefold. Set in the 1960s, The Queen’s Gambit presents a glamorous, passionate chess prodigy quite different from the one typically served up in films like Pawn Sacrifice and Searching for Bobby Fischer, which feature a misunderstood young white male driven to self-destruction by devotion to the highly cerebral game.

While The Queen’s Gambit has been praised for showcasing a (fictional) female chess champion, the reality is that women have played a major part in chess history, including in the era featured in the Netflix show. In particular, the Soviet Union produced some of the world’s premier women’s chess champions, including Nona Gaprindashvili of Soviet Georgia, the only real-life chess player featured, albeit briefly, in The Queen’s Gambit.

An announcer in the final episode compares the two women, but tells the audience that, unlike our American heroine, Gaprindashvili never faced off against men. That is not quite true. Nona Gaprindashvili was the first woman to be named a grandmaster (in 1978), and she faced male players throughout the 1960s, winning numerous tournaments – though not the World Chess Championship featured in the show. She did however win the Women’s World Championship for 16 consecutive years, from 1962 to 1978.

In Gaprindashvili’s opinion, chess was a sport where gender equality was possible due to its clear-cut rules. In an interview with the website ChessBase, she said, “I admire other sportsmen and sportswomen, who are many times faced with corrupt decisions by the referees and are forced to accept them,” adding that for that reason she was, “very thankful that chess was my sport of choice.”

In honor of Gaprindashvili’s accomplishments, a perfume factory in Tbilisi created a fragrance inspired by her. Called simply “Nona,” the bottle was in the shape of a chess piece: the queen.