The Queen’s Gambit: The Iceberg Approach to Research
No one watched this show in order to learn chess.
MY FATHER taught my brother and I to play chess when we were kids, which is to say he taught us the fundamentals—the pieces and their moves, the basic structure of the game, promotion and en passant. Dad wasn’t a deep student of the game, but he gave us the basics, which I promptly forgot in my pursuit of video game skilz and baseball card collecting1.
Then, when I was a twenty-something worker drone in a cubicle in New York City, I briefly became obsessed with chess again2. This was mainly a rage against a machine: Specifically a stupid freeware chess game I’d downloaded out of curiosity. This stupid freeware chess game beat me easily, over and over again, and I became absolutely determined to defeat it3.
Cue Jeff’s Age of Chess. I bought books. I played the computer constantly. I tried to get some friends to play me. I studied and practiced and by god I beat that stupid game, and then kept beating it, and then lost interest4. But I retained the basic knowledge I’d acquired, which perked up when The Duchess and I started watching The Queen’s Gambit last year like just about everyone else trapped in their home at the time5. The series was enjoyable, and notable in the way it downplayed the whole chess angle, considering it’s a story about a world-class chess player.
Good Research, Bad Writing
Writers often find themselves working on a story that requires knowledge they don’t have, so they do some research6. This can actually be one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing a story, deep-diving into a subject or experience you’re unfamiliar with and becoming something of an armchair expert in a short amount of time.
It’s so enjoyable a lot of writers, even well-paid professionals, make the mistake of trying to cram all of their research onto the page or screen. It’s like they think, well, I spent all those hours and all that energy learning this shit, I want people to know it. So they dump exposition into the story, explaining theory and history and strategy and nuance, most of which doesn’t really contribute to the story so much as prove to the audience that they, well, did a lot of research7.
And then you have The Queen’s Gambit.
The author of the novel, Walter Tevis, was a good-not-great chess player with a deep love for the game. He actually played in tournaments and understood the chess world of the 1960s and 1970s pretty well. In order to ensure they got it right in the adaptation, the producers hired National Grandmaster Bruce Pandolfini to consult on the series, and brought in former World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov to offer advice8. Kasparov described Tevis’ chess descriptions in the novel as “amateurish” and offered to help stage the chess sequences so they would be realistic and acceptable to chess players who would know better.
As a result, all of the chess positions in the show are realistic, all of the strategies discussed are sound, and the behavior of the players at the tournaments is based on how actual chess players behave9. But the remarkable thing is that you can watch the whole series and be completely unaware, because the makers of The Queen’s Gambit understood one paramount thing: This is not a story about chess. It’s the story of an emotionally traumatized orphan who finds her way to stability and happiness. Chess is just what she does, and the show runners are smart enough to treat it that way10. In other words, they don’t shove all that research into your face. It’s an iceberg.
The Iceberg
What The Queen’s Gambit gets right about research and verisimilitude is that it buries it11. If you are familiar with chess, the chess positions and games shown on the screen will make sense. They are real games, plausible positions for the people playing, and the moves that Beth Harmon, chess prodigy, and her adversaries, also very good chess players, make are good moves. Even when they are dramatic brilliancies12, they are plausible as such. The one complaint I’ve seen that rings true is that there are no draws depicted in the series. A lot of chess matches end in a draw—that’s when neither side has the ability to force a checkmate, so there’s no point in continuing13. It’s essentially a tie, and it isn’t at all uncommon for strong players to force a draw even if they get into trouble. Even a genius like Beth Harmon should see some draws in her time, and I think that concept is universal enough that it probably should have been included. I can see an argument that the producers wanted to highlight the cutthroat, competitive nature of chess, and maybe suspected non-players wouldn’t understand how common a draw really is.
If you’ve been to a chess tournament, those scenes will also pass the smell test. They feel real because they were well-researched and the consultants were listened to.
What the show does not do is try to explain any of this. If you’re unfamiliar with chess, you won’t miss a beat. The accuracy of the games and the behavior adds to the sense of realness, it helps to sell the story, but it isn’t the point. It’s there if you can see it, and it’s invisible if you can’t or don’t care to. There’s no five minute expository scene where chess is explained14. There’s no sidekick character whose sole purpose is to explain why certain moves or strategies are good or bad15. The producers of the show opted to not show their work, and that is the 100 percent correct way to deal with research. Your research should be an iceberg. Most of it should never be seen.
The problem many writers run into is that once you’ve made yourself an armchair expert in something, you want to show off. You want people to know how hard you worked, but you also want people to know that you know what you’re talking about—that the details on the page are correct. It’s essential to any story that you resist this urge, but writers are weak people. The target you’re aiming for is precisely where The Queen’s Gambit landed: All the research is there, if you know to look for it, but it doesn’t get in the way of anything.
I still play chess. And I still mostly lose. Like, a lot.
Next: The plot of The Plot.
The latter worked out for me in that I still have 50 pounds of baseball cards I lug around with me everywhere I move. No, they’re not worth anything. Believe me, The Duchess asks me that question every time the cards have to be moved somewhere. The former … did not work out, as I have the hand-eye coordination of a piece of wood.
I mean, my only other option was to, you know, do my job. No thank you, The Man.
This is one of the rare times in my life when I was filled with purpose and drive, and I did not enjoy the experience.
That was obviously a triumph of pattern memorization more than anything else. Me beating that crappy chess program was akin to someone beating Pac-Man: All you have to do is remember those patterns.
I tried to spend lockdown drinking whiskey, but after a few weeks I was pale, yellowed, and couldn’t stop shaking, so I was forced to reconsider my life decisions.
In my case, of course, this is every single story I write, as I know nothing.
It’s like when I learn a new breakdancing move and can’t resist showing it off to everyone I meet.
Kasparov will forever be known as the guy who lost to Deep Blue in 1997, which will eventually be remembered as the beginning of the Rise of the Machines.
You know: Sitting perfectly still and chewing their nails, occasionally leaping up and shouting “I HAVE YOU NOW!” or “I WILL DESTROY YOU!”
Far too many writers forget that what you do does not necessarily equal who you are. A bad writer would have Beth Harmon wearing chessboard-patterned clothes, talking about chess constantly, and having few other interests. Tevis at least understood that a desire to get blasted is universal.
This is also what I get right about my feelings.
One of my favorite words, this describes a chess game that is aesthetically beautiful and brilliant in execution. I like to use it as a general-purpose superlative, because I can.
A lot of my games end in a draw because I am very bad at Endgame strategy. Actually, strike that, let’s recast as “A lot of my games end in a draw because I am very bad at chess.” Thank you, I feel better now.
This is the correct decision. It’s always safe to assume that if your audience was interested in chess, they would have learned chess before watching.
I was born to be that character, because my specialty is explaining things to people that they already understand, usually better than I do.
The Queen’s Gambit: The Iceberg Approach to Research
Great article. Thanks for all the helpful information.
I found the meat of your article to be timely; as it happens I'm in the middle of editing a short story anthology and there is this one tale where the author has the character eat some sausages. The story is set in contemporary Germany, so I ask, "What kind of sausages are they?" I thought it might be good to work in a little local color, though the author had done a good job of that as things stood.
So she gave me the information I asked for but no matter how I looked at it, it didn't feel right. The "not feeling right," I realized, after reading your article, was me trying to shoehorn in unnecessary information for "color" rather than because it actually made the story better. So after reading your article we went back to "sausages" and we were able to get on with our lives. :)