The six-part movie on the epic match will be broadcast on the 17th of October, but you can watch the entire series now on the Arte Internet web site. 

If Arte is not available in your country, you can watch the series on YouTube. Full instructions on how to catch the series are to be found in our previous report. Warning: the total watch time is close to five hours!

Before I start on today's article, I have a little quiz question for you: who do you think the actor here is playing? It is someone you know fairly well. The answer will be given later in this article.

As I said in my previous report, written after I had watched parts one to three of the series, I found them quite gripping. But for me, watching them was a unique experience. I was part of Garry's team in Philadelphia and New Your, and present at almost every minute of scenes depicted in the movie. It was sometimes jarring to see how many scenes were not quite accurate. But on the other hand, I realize that the narrative was often changed for dramatic effect. That is good. This is not a historical documentation describing exactly what transpired during the Kasparov-Deep Blue encounters. It is a film that, like Queen's Gambit, is intended to appeal to a lay audience.

I will give you a few examples of things that were changed and not wholly accurate. For starters let us take a look at the computer Deep Blue:

That is how it is shown in the movie, and that is what it really looked like. The flashing, blinking lights in the film version are definitely more impressive.

While watching the movie I would, every few minutes, mutter "That's not right," and "That's not what happened." But then you start to accept it. Many deviations from strict accuracy are unimportant, some of them a dramatic improvement on reality. What I learned is how they take incidents that are too cumbersome or too remote and weave them into their script. Here are two examples:

In the first episode of Rematch, Garry meets CB Hsu (whom they call "PC") and mentions a computer game he played "ten years ago". Watch half a minute of the following:

"The first time I saw a computer was ten years ago," Garry says. "I used to play 'Hopper' on it – the video game with the little frog that has to cross the street and a river. My highest score was 16,000 points." PC says he knew and loved that game. His own high score: 47,000!

Cute. But it didn't happen quite this way. They took the story from our newspage, which quotes from Garry's book Deep Thinking. You can read here. It tells about how he received the game from me, and on a visit to my home boasted that he was the Champion of Baku in Hopper – with a high score of 16,000 points. So I challenged him to try it against a three-year-old. And Tommy went on to score 47,000 points – just like PC claims to have done.

But of course the movie could not suddenly relocate to a small town in northern Germany, with a three-year-old introduced into the plot. This way they could insert the Hopper story into the film as an amusing little exchange.

Here's another example of how these film producers work. In episode four, one scene, Garry has refused to appear for a game and has instead "disappeared" into the city (never happened). A member of the IBM team finds him at a place between 3rd Avenue and 48th street, where one of the biggest display chess boards in New York is located. In their confrontation, the IBM team member gives him a puzzle: A game begins with 1.e4 and ends in the fifth move with knight takes rook mate. What were the moves?

Garry gets involved. Watch him working on it – the section contains wonderful animated graphics of Garry thinking, with the moves flashing across the board. He solves the puzzle and then proceeds to the venue to play game four.

Of course, that is not at all what happened with this puzzle. As I have narrated in a number of articles, it is a problem I gave Garry and Anatoly Karpov during a car ride to Zurich in 1986. They could not solve it. A number of months later Garry called me in desperation from a Botvinnik course he was conducting. He had given his students the puzzle, and they – as well as he and Botvinnik – were unable to solve it. I had to dictate the moves to him. Garry, who, like every one else in the chess school, was convinced I had stated the problem incorrectly, couldn't believe that he and his students had missed the solution. Here is one article (from 2013) giving the original story.

Once again, the use of this in the Rematch movie might seem gratuitous, but I don't disapprove: They liked the story, but of course could not interrupt the stream of their narrative to reconstruct his actual confrontation with the problem.

But a couple of things were a little painful. When Garry's manager brushes up on his chess, and plays a practice game against Garry, he gets mated in two moves – after he happens to play 1.g4 and 2.f3. But I suppose an absolute lay audience finds that remarkable.

Another preposterous is Garry preparing for his next game against Deep Blue by playing a simul in his room against hundreds of amateurs online. Here's what that looked like. Never happened, of course – and it is certainly not the way you prepare for an important game.

And then there are moments of gross exaggeration. In this scene, PC tells his colleague that he is Deep Blue (who is incidentally female in the series) should be able to learn by herself. "All we have to do is show her all the games played against Kasparov. She'll discover Garry's weaknesses and then exploit them. She'll quickly reach Kasparov's level, and then she'll surpass him. It would be like deep learning." Yes, that actually became possible – thirty years later!

Who was the actor at the top of this article playing? You probably couldn't guess: it's supposed to be Anatoly Karpov, in 1985, during during his match against Kasparov.

Not even close!

Christian Cooke, on the other hand, is an English actor (and director). His portrayal of Garry Kasparov is much more convincing. After watching him for five hours, you slowly get used to him and actually see Garry. The mannerisms and the accent, which he has carefully studied, are quite well executed. That certainly helps a lot. 

For any of you who speak German, there is a major SPIEGEL interview out today.