The Queen's Gambit

“The next Sunday she blocked the Scholar’s Mate with her king’s knight. She had gone over the game in her mind a hundred times, until the anger and humiliation were purged from it, leaving the pieces and the board clear in her nighttime vision.”

Even from her early days playing, Beth’s motivation in chess is to win, and there is nothing she dislikes more than losing. The pain and fear of losing is a double-edged sword for Beth: It spurs her to improve, but it also clouds her mind and prevents her from seeing clearly. To win, she must pass through this pain and fear and find clarity on the other side. Increasingly, she turns to pills to achieve this clarity.

“And she was scared to go to bed tonight without pills. She had been sleeping only two or three hours a night for the past two nights. Her eyes felt gritty and the back of her neck, even right after showering, was sweaty.”

When Methuen stops giving the children tranquilizers, Beth suffers from withdrawal symptoms. She comes to discover that the pills not only make her feel good but that their absence makes her feel terrible, creating a need for them in her mind.

“Somehow she sensed that what she had been caught doing was of a magnitude beyond usual punishment. And, deeper than that, she was aware of the complicity of the orphanage that had fed her and all the others on pills that would make them less restless, easier to deal with.”

When Beth is reprimanded for taking the green pills after breaking into the office, she understands that she is not the only one in the room who has done wrong. Methuen has been using pills to control the children even though the medication is addictive and unsafe for them.

“If only Jolene could see it. For a moment she felt like crying for Jolene, she wanted Jolene to be there, going around the room with her while they looked at all the furniture and then hung Beth’s clothes in the closet.”

At no point in The Queen’s Gambit does Beth forget Jolene. Jolene is her best friend, and Beth often hopes for Jolene to share in her life with her. The bond they forge in the orphanage is so strong that Beth never stops wishing for Jolene to have a better life.

“The girl in front of Beth was named Margaret; she had glowing blond hair and wore a cashmere sweater of a pale, expensive lavender. As Beth sat down, the blond head turned slightly back toward her. ‘Brain!’ Margaret hissed. ‘Goddamn brain!’”

At Beth’s new school, other students identify her as an outcast and often make fun of her for her intelligence. Beth struggles to fit in with any group, and the alienation from other students only pushes her further into embracing her gifts.

“The room was full of people talking and a few playing; most of them were young men or boys. Beth saw one woman and no colored people.”

Beth notices from a young age that chess does not have a very inclusive culture. Throughout her career in The Queen’s Gambit, Beth’s opponents are almost exclusively white men, and she rarely meets other women or people of color at chess events. This in many ways motivates her, as she hopes to change the culture by becoming the best chess player in the world.

“There were more people watching her play than watching Beltik. She kept looking at the board, waiting for something to open up. Once when she looked up she saw Annette Packer standing at the back. Packer smiled and Beth nodded to her.”

This moment Beth shares with Annette, a girl she beat in the first round of the tournament, is the first time since the orphanage that Beth feels support from a peer. There is a solidarity that exists between the two as both understand the struggle of competing in a male-dominated field.

“Elizabeth Harmon, a seventh-grade student at Fairfield Junior, showed ‘a mastery of the game unequaled by any female’ according to Harry Beltik, whom Miss Harmon defeated for the state crown.”

Beth feels the pressure of gender expectations away from the chessboard as well, most often through how the media or other competitors view and speak of her. In this case, Harry Beltik offers a back-handed compliment to Beth, saying he is impressed because she played so well despite her gender. Beth will often chafe against this kind of attention. She wants to be valued for her skill and not just for her ability to defy sexist expectations.

“The second day was as easy as the first, even though Beth was matched against stronger players. It had taken her a while to clear her head from the effect of the pills, but by the time she started playing her mind was sharp. She even handled the pieces themselves with confidence, picking them up and setting them down with aplomb.”

As she grows older, Beth begins to realize that her substance misuse has an impact on her ability to play chess. At first, the pills make it hard to clear her mind in the morning, raising the stakes for some games in which she cannot visualize strategy. As time goes on, however, and her substance use worsens, its impact on her cognitive faculties grows more pronounced.

“Beth drank a mouthful. It stung her throat slightly, but then she felt a sensation of warmth in her stomach. Her face was flushed-as though she were blushing.”

This is the moment in which Beth first drinks alcohol and discovers another substance that she will use. Just as with the pills, Beth identifies the positives of alcohol through how it makes her stomach feel. Both undo any knots in her stomach and calm her.

“She was out to win now. She would hammer at his weakness. She loved it. She loved attack.”

Beth’s style of chess is aggressive. She wants to eviscerate her competition, constantly having them on their heels and looking for a defense. As many competitors discount her because she is a woman, her strong attacks are even more powerful.

“She would not let herself get sick. She would eat frequently and drink one beer—or one glass of wine—every hour. She had made love the night before, and now it was time to learn about being drunk. She was alone, and she liked it. It was the way she had learned everything important in her life.”

Beth approaches drinking with the same focus and precision she applies to chess. Just as with the pills and with chess, Beth experiments to learn, strategizing how best to use alcohol to her advantage while avoiding its downsides. This is a form of self-delusion. She convinces herself that she can control and master an addictive substance that soon controls her.

“She felt old and weary playing this tireless child with his bright dark eyes and quick little movements; she knew that if she made even a small blunder, he would be at her throat.”

When Beth plays a Russian child in Mexico City, she has a glimpse of what she once appeared to be. She realizes that she was once the bright child always on the attack, and now understands how infuriating it was to her former competitors.

“Against a world’s champion, whose shirt was impeccably white, whose tie was beautifully tied, whose dark-jowled Russian face admitted no doubt or weakness.”

Borgov is the best Russian chess player, and therefore the best chess player in the world. Beth is terrified of him not only because of his talent but because of his appearance. Borgov’s appearance is as impeccable and stalwart as his game, and Beth’s inability to find any weaknesses scares her.

“Dos Equis. It took four of them to make the pain in her stomach go away, to blur the fury and shame. Even when it began to ease, she could still see Borgov’s dark, heavy face and could feel the frustration she had felt during their match. She had played like a novice, like a passive, embarrassed fool.”

When Beth loses to Borgov for the first time, it is the first major defeat in which she feels she could not have done better. She played to the best of her ability, and it wasn’t enough. She copes with the rage and disappointment by drinking heavily, foreshadowing her later development of an alcohol use disorder after another loss to Borgov.

“It seemed as though she felt nothing, but five minutes passed before Beth was able to let go of Mrs. Wheatley’s cold arm and pick up the telephone.”

Beth believes that she feels nothing for Alma Wheatley when she dies, and yet Beth cannot leave her side for minutes. Alma is the only family Beth has, and though she is often distant, her support makes Beth’s chess career possible.

“Chess was like that. The geometry of a position could be read and reread and not exhausted of possibility. You saw deeply into this layer of it, but there was another layer beyond that, and another.”

Chess occasionally terrifies Beth because of its endless possibilities. The seemingly infinite permutations of moves and countermoves are fascinating, but as she loses herself in strategizing, she fears falling down an endless hole of chess.

“She momentarily considered walking into the town, where she had heard there were a dozen places to drink beer, but thought better of it. She did not want to erode any more brain cells.”

At many times throughout The Queen’s Gambit, Beth reels in her substance misuse, aware of how it impacts her ability to play. In this situation, as in many others, her drive to win overpowers her addiction.

“Every now and then they would play a game, and Beth always won it. She could feel herself moving past Benny in a way that was almost physical. It was astounding to them both.”

When Beth trains with Benny, her talent explodes, and she soon surpasses him. They both witness her growth, and it astounds them that she can develop as quickly as she does with proper training, highlighting how her background in an orphanage has disadvantaged her career trajectory.

“They continued as lovers and did not play any more games, except from the books...She was fond of him, but that was all. And by the last week before Paris, she was beginning to feel that he had little left to teach her.”

Just as with her relationship with Harry Beltik, Beth’s relationship with Benny Watts begins to erode once she surpasses him in chess. As Beth grows more knowledgeable and practiced, Benny cannot keep up with her or even challenge her. After this, he grows cold and their relationship fizzles out, with Beth no longer seeing a need for him.

“By the thirty-fifth her throat was dry, and what she saw in front of her on the board was the disarray of her position and the growing strength of Borgov’s. It was incredible. She was playing her best chess, and he was beating her.”

Beth’s second match against Borgov plays out like the first, and she finds herself falling behind. She cannot find weaknesses in his playstyle, and no matter what she does, he has an answer. With his calm, dominant play, Borgov comes to represent Beth’s worst fears about her own limitations. 

“Sometimes the drink had to be forced against a rejection of it by her body, but she did it. She would get it down and wait and the feelings would subside a bit. It was like turning down the volume.”

After her loss to Borgov in Paris, Beth turns to intense alcohol use. She drinks all day, every day, and often continues drinking even as it makes her feel sick. This moment represents the extreme of Beth’s substance use and the most serious moment since her attempted theft of the tranquilizers as a child at Methuen.

“Beth felt no grief for the dead man, no sadness that he was gone. The only thing she felt was guilt that she had never sent him his ten dollars—she should have mailed him a check years ago.”

Though Beth does not see Mr. Shaibel after she leaves Methuen, his influence on her is undeniable. His gift of $10 to her for her first tournament jumpstarts her career, and though she is not overly emotional over his death, she regrets not repaying this debt to him.