'Queen's Gambit': The series that shows chess like never before on television

As in Stefan Zweig's classic

, Walter Tevis - a writer who was

overly attracted by

the torment of genius and the condition of an

- built his novel

, where he recounts the Dickensian avatars of a young prodigy and chess teacher, based on the always appetizing duel between the irrational and the rational.

The too human and the not human at all.

In his case, unlike Zweig, he did so by taking sides with an unbridled irrationality that allows him to explore the connection between genius and madness, or between gift and psychosis.

Tevis understood talent as something at times unbearable, something that requires a sacrifice, such as the famous opening, the gambit - a type of movement in chess - which gives its name to the novel on which the great weekly Netflix premiere is based. .

Addictive and fast-paced - at least, from the second chapter, when the life of the protagonist, Beth Harmon, comes to life, far from the isolation of the orphanage - the series stars an Anya Taylor-Joy

at the height of the character's hieratic - as Martian as the David Bowie who starred in the adaptation of the other great Tevis classic,

.

Lasting six chapters, it is both a portrait of the chess underworld, that parallel universe with its own stars, and that Tevis himself knew well - although he never went beyond being a class C player -, and a bizarre

that takes the feminist pulse of an era that in a space as closed as chess seems to be trapped in time.

But there is more.

Much more.

The relationship between Harmon (Taylor-Joy) and his adoptive mother, Alma (Mariele Heller), for example, pure damn fire.

Because Harmon isn't limited to being a genius, he's a battered genius.

Daughter of another genius, in her case, of mathematics, completely crazy - her car crashes, with her and the girl inside, at the beginning of the series, and disappears from the map -, Beth spends her childhood in an orphanage, in the That two things happen to him: first, he discovers chess, thanks to a janitor who plays alone in a basement, and second, he becomes fond of tranquilizers, which in the fifties seemed entirely suitable for children.

One thing and the other will remain forever linked in the girl Beth's mathematical and intuitive brain, who will now need any type of depressant -alcohol, pills- to feel that she can withstand the pressure that, in reality, she exerts against herself.

Because she is the true rival to beat.

When you study, you don't study your opponent's weaknesses, but your own.

And he does it to become invincible.

To control the uncontrollable.

“I like chess,” Harmon tells the

journalist

who comes to interview her when she wins her first state tournament, “because it's a world in 64 squares.

A place to feel safe.

Predictable, controllable ”.

While the outside world, and her own womanhood, are difficult for her to understand, another constant in Tevis's work, that of the

, who in

, was, literally, an extraterrestrial who tried to imitate human behavior, when Beth plays chess she is, in a way, at home.

Hence, he says at one point that chess "is not only competitive, it can also be precious", a world within the world, the family that he will never have, or it will appear to him as a mirage.

One of the best players in the world, Garry Kasparov, claims to have never seen a series that respects both the strategies and times of chess: he assures that it is the most realistic of the very few series that have been done on a sport, in short, little visual.

Although complicated and cruel in the beginning, Beth's relationship with her adoptive mother, an inveterate alcoholic, takes off the moment she decides that she can try to be “a mother” after all, and manages to be an excellent one, despite everything. , because he does the main thing: respect his daughter, and blindly believe in her.

Their relationship, that of a couple of misfits trying not to adapt to anything, not even themselves, is a little gem in a production that shoots against the eminent machismo that surrounds everything that has to do with the world of chess - especially, in the lower strata, in which the arrogance of mediocrity is unbearable - and that, according to the perfectly recounted teacher Judit Pólgar, born in 1976 and considered the best player in history, in the documentary

, is still fully in force.

And here's why it didn't matter when, the Tevis novel had to adapt. Because, although it seems like one of many Netflix products,

has, since 1983, the year in which a journalist from

bought the rights, trying to be adapted. Tevis's death shortly thereafter prevented the thing from happening, but less than a decade later, Allan Scott, the same screenwriter who appears in the credits of the Netflix production, bought back those rights, and shaped a script for cinema that, along with the guy who adapted

for Spielberg, Frank Scott, turned into a series. The result settles accounts, and in a remarkable and above all enjoyable way, with all the ghosts of the considered most difficult game in the world, and incidentally with the price - there is always one - of talent.