On Beth Harmon, Chess and YouTube Algorithms

Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon in The Queen's Gambit

How does something become a trend?

Can a trend be entirely manufactured and foreseen in advance, or the element of chance will always remain the central piece of the equation?

Was there ever a better timing for the release of The Queen's Gambit? Would it attract as much attention from the general public if not for the self-confinement and what is now almost a year of social distancing? Would people buy out chess sets in surprising numbers and sign up for web services to play chess online if they could go for a regular beer with their pals in the evening? Would they do the same if Beth Harmon was portrayed by someone else and not by the charming and one-of-a-kind Anya Taylor-Joy?

The Queen's Gambit has made chess fashionable, and I recognize the appeal.

Wouldn't you like to be unique - beautiful, stylish, the smartest person in the room, yet still that tiny bit awkward and misunderstood, so that there's an illusion of challenge? So that it's not all determined and boring, and feels as if you are fighting against impossible odds when, in reality, no one is even close to your level?

The Queen's Gambit is an extremely beautiful piece of media. For better and for worse.

The better part includes carefully crafted sets, meticulous attention to detail, strong direction, and often exceptional performance by the cast. It's oh-so-stylish, with even the simplest of outfits and designs looking as sharp as it gets. Honestly, I wonder about the effect the series had on the shopping habits as such in general, not only on the sales of chess sets and clocks. So much about this series feels like a commercial.

An excellent one, mind you, but one nevertheless.

Do you remember that Audi A3 commercial with Daft Punk? Minimalistic, chic, sophisticated. It made me want to drive an Audi even though I never liked the brand, simply because of all the classy aura around it. I feel the same way about The Queen's Gambit. I watch it and want to be skinny and stylish, and play chess better than most. The Queen's Gambit is screaming "You are special", and "You are intelligent", and "You can do it". I guess especially so if you are a woman.

Was it a gamble on Netflix's part trying to monetize the idea of intelligence? Did it click by chance or due to careful consideration?

BBC Sherlock's iconic "Smart is the new sexy" immediately comes to mind. It was 2012 and worked perfectly then. So well that people kept consuming Sherlock content for the next 5 years, long after there was anything smart left to the series. Intelligence, or rather the illusion of being intelligent, sells. There's hardly anyone out there who wouldn't want to feel sophisticated and smart, even if by association only. The Queen's Gambit offers exactly that - a chance to feel intelligent without putting any actual work into it.

And don't get me wrong, I don't consider this a bad thing at all, even if I may sound somewhat critical writing this. On the contrary, I think it's illustrative of how well the creators of the series understood the audience. This is where The Queen's Gambit comes out the strongest.

For the worse part, the series is too beautiful to ever dare to go in-depth. There it would inevitably get messy. The Queen's Gambit is described to be a story about overcoming addiction and personal drama, but no actual overcoming takes place during almost 6 hours of screentime. The problems of addiction and purposelessness resolve themselves as if by magic. The most memorable part about the addiction plot is the unique tone of the pills Beth took. Classy as they were.

Storywise the most interesting conversation of the whole series happened in episode 4 when Beth asked a 13-years old Russian chess player who she had just beaten in a tight match about his plans for after he's the World Champion, leaving it open to discussion whether she understood that the question was just as relevant to her. Sadly, it's a subject that The Queen's Gambit wasn't keen on pursuing.

Still, the better part bears far more weight, and therefore The Queen's Gambit undoubtedly deserves its time in the sun. For however long it's going to last.

Inescapably I come to the question - can this momentum last, though? Does chess as a game has the potential to remain trendy without the looks of Anya Taylor-Joy and the overall stylishness of the series? Or is it simply too complex to keep the interest of the masses for long? How many people will read beyond the third page of their recently purchased book on chess openings?

Don't get me wrong once again, chess is a highly popular game, and you can play it without being a chess prodigy or reading any literature at all (if your opponent is of more or less the same level). Millions of people all over the world have played it long before The Queen's Gambit became a thing.

My question is rather - to what extent do the target audiences of The Queen's Gambit and chess as a game overlap? How many people have watched this series and consequently have discovered a genuine passion for chess and not for the beautiful image sold by The Queen's Gambit? How many of them will carry on playing once they hit the enormous wall that separates people who just like the idea and mechanics of the game from those who have meticulously studied it for years?

I bet there won't be many. Yet maybe it's just my laziness and lack of persistence speaking.

A month ago, if someone had asked me whether I like chess, I would probably have responded with something like "I know how the pieces move but have zero clues as to how to win at it". That happens to be true.

Yet another thing is also accurate. I used to like chess a lot as a child. I remember being little and playing a lot of it with my sister. Honestly, I don't know why we stopped at one moment. Did we got bored and moved to something else instead? Or did we simply reach the point where to continue to progress one should have turned to the literature, and it wasn't something we were up for? Probably both. We had no books and no real chess aficionados in the family, and finding other ways to use chess pieces (like playing bowling with them) seemed just as fun back then.

Since then, I have only played chess two times.

One time was when I was 17 and at a summer camp and wanted to impress a guy. I don't remember if I won, but I certainly did impress him. It was exciting and I definitely enjoyed it. Yet it also felt a lot like bragging. And for better or for worse I was raised believing that bragging is not something to be proud of. Probably that's why chess didn't stick with me back then either.

In the summer of 2019, some of my friends got interested in chess, and I played a couple of matches with them, mostly online. I soon realized that playing online lacks that essential element of facing an actual opponent, alive and breathing. Also, we played without a time limit, therefore matches could drag out for days and weeks, and there wasn't much fun in it for me. More so, being cruel to my friends, even if on chessboard only, didn't work for me either.

In late October, early November, when everyone began talking about The Queen's Gambit, I couldn't make myself start watching it for some reason. Yes, I was deep into the world of Red Dead Redemption 2, when not studying, yet it's also possible that a part of me feared facing myself and my own beliefs about what constitutes intelligence and hard-work. Deep down, I knew I could have been good at this game, far from Beth Harmon's levels of good, but still above most. If only I had confidence, a conviction, and a determination to work hard to achieve it. Yet I had none of the above. For some reason, I grew up to believe that one's intelligence was something to be hidden from plain sight.

Beth Harmon had no doubts, though.

I wonder if this is what distinguishes actual talents from everyone else? A sense of certainty. Even if of one thing only. And it's not that you are necessary exceptionally good at something - it's that you are so much better at one particular thing in your life.

I've mentioned purposelessness before, but now I think I might have misjudged the state Beth Harmon was in. I assumed that everyone who's extremely talented faces these existential questions at one time - "What am I to do now?", "What is my life actually about?", where in fact everyone does that at some point. The difference is that some of us have no point of reference at all, most of us have no exceptional abilities to cling to.

I ask myself isn't this one of the reasons why The Queen's Gambit turned out to be so relevant in this particular moment in time? Everything around us is currently about uncertainty boosted up to the limit. It might have been true in the intellectual sphere for more than a century already, but now it is also our private and social lives.

In the series, Beth described the chessboard as an entire world of just 64 squares. A world that feels safe, controllable, and predictable. Is it really a surprise The Queen's Gambit resonated to the extent that it did when this is what we all desperately want right now?

Of course, it needs to be said that Netflix began production of the series back in 2019, long before the pandemic became the subject of the day or even existed. So if it proves anything, it's the importance of the element of chance in the birth of a trend.

So what made me eventually watch The Queen's Gambit?

I started with episode 1 in early January, and it didn't stick. No Anya Taylor-Joy, shady orphanage, and the chessboard on the ceiling thing that didn't work much for my taste. I was ready to give up on the series. That's when YouTube algorithms did their magic.

In spring, I took a course where we spent a significant amount of time discussing algorithms, their influence on the overall quality of the media we consume, and many more connected subjects. I was wondering whether algorithms can help discover new things after all or we as consumers are eventually doomed to keep seeing the same type of content over and over again (in a different package of course, but still the same)? I was much convinced of the latter.

Now, I'm finishing this piece on February 16th. Over the weekend I spent 8 or so hours watching Opera Euro Rapid streams. Never before have I watched chess tournaments, yet YouTube was pushing hard to convince me I wanted to watch chess content. And I have to say, the tournament turned out to be a lot of fun. Probably far more than the whole of The Queen's Gambit.

One of the most common tricks algorithms will do is cross-reference what other people with similar tastes to yours have watched lately. It's no surprise that my feed featured The Queen's Gambit videos as I go through a lot of movie and media reviews. For some time I managed to avoid them until one day I got a suggestion for a video where Magnus Carlsen discussed the series. I knew the name. In my late teens and early twenties I did team-quizzes and the name popped up a lot as Carlsen had just recently become the youngest World Champion in history. I didn't care much. It angered me, to be honest, that I had to remember these kinds of names. I saw no practical use in the knowledge. A number of years later though this little emotional connection turned out to be reason enough to give in to YouTube's suggestions. Carlsen turned out to be not at all what I expected from a chess prodigy. Emotional, funny and quite nice-looking too. I watched some more videos. Next thing I knew my feed was all chess analysis and The Queen's Gambit stuff. I had no choice but to give the series another try now.

Having watched the show, I started writing this piece, and to get me into the right mood decided to turn on Opera Euro Rapid that was in my suggestions for days as background, ending up pinned to the screen for 3 hours straight.

So what happened? Did YouTube convince me that I was interested in chess by meticulously and persistently pushing particular content to my feed or was it all me? If you are only offered that much choice, is there really a choice? Yet at the same time could the level of response that watching rapid chess tournament sparked in me had been foreseen or programmed to happen?

Is this sudden interest in a thing that's completely new to me proof that even with a tightly controlled flow of content there's still a good possibility to discover new things and be challenged to learn new things and improve oneself?

Or is this just a lucky coincidence?

At the end of the day, even if my road towards it was all backward, I'm where most of the people who watched The Queen's Gambit ended up - with a newly acquired chessboard, chess.com account, and determination to learn at least a couple of openings. Will it last, though?

Maybe this is where the real test for my newly thanks-to-algorithms discovered passion lies.

If it's a real passion it should stick. Will it, though?

For now, I'm letting time be the judge of it.