Queen's Gambit Accepted Powerbook 2019
How do you play the Queen's Gambit Acceptedt? Does White have promising variations or can Black construct a water-tight repertoire? The Powerbook provides the answers based on 195 000 games, most of them played by engines.
Queen's Gambit is a novel by Walter Tevis, who already put billiard players at the centre of his stories with his books "The Hustler" and "The Color of Money". Both novels were filmed with actor Paul Newman. Perhaps Tevis' most famous novel adapted for the screen, is "The Man Who Fell to Earth". Released in 1963, this novel is about an alien who has landed on Earth in search of water for his planet and is trying to cope here. In 1976, Nicolas Roeg ("Don't Look Now") filmed the story with David Bowie in the lead role and created a disturbing visual aesthetic.
Queen's Gambit Accepted Powerbase 2019
The QGA PowerBase 2019 is a database and contains a total of 9,440 games, 170 of which are annotated.
In Queen's Gambit, Tevis focuses his imagination on the life of a chess player. The story and its main character shares thematic elements from the lives of Lisa Lane and Bobby Fischer.
How to play the Queen's Gambit
Garry Kasparov took to the Queen’s Gambit at a relatively late stage of his chess career, but then had the best training anyone could imagine: in his first match for the world championship against Anatoly Karpov, this opening appeared on the board no less than 19 times. Now he shares his knowledge with you.
Beth Harmon is orphaned at the age of eight after her parents were killed in a car accident. She is being housed in an orphanage in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, where the children are treated badly and kept sedated with medication. Harmon learns the chess game from a caretaker in the basement and develops a great talent.
She is adopted by Alma and Allston Wheatley, and attends a proper school, but remains an outsider. When the Wheatley family falls apart, her foster mother seeks refuge in alcohol.
Beth, now age 13, is keen to develop her chess skills, but has no money for books or a coach. So she steals a chess magazine from a newsstand and a classmates money to participate in a chess tournament, which she wins.
As a 16-year-old she participates in the Open US Championship. At 18, she becomes the US champion. Then she travels to Russia to compete with the Soviet chess players, but faces setbacks. Plagued by self-doubt and addicted to tranquillizers, her career stagnates, but then Beth receives help from a friend from the orphanage, who teaches her discipline and leads her to the right path.
Queen's Gambit was published in 1983 by Random House. Rafford Films bought the film rights already in 1997, but the story never made it into production. In 2007, actor Heath Ledger (who also played chess) set to make his directorial debut with Ellen Page in the leading role, but that effort was derailed following Ledger’s death in January, 2008.
Now the film adaptation is on again, this time produced by Netflix, as a six episode series. Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) will take on the role of Beth Harmon.
Power Play 23: A Repertoire for black with the Queen's Gambit Declined
On this DVD Grandmaster Daniel King offers you a repertoire for Black with the QGD. The repertoire is demonstrated in 10 stem games, covering all White's major systems: 5 Bg5, 5 Bf4, and the Exchange Variation.
Walter Tevis was born in San Francisco in 1928. At the age of ten, his parents brought him to Stanford Children's Convalescent Home for a year, having acquired land in Kentucky and trying to gain a foothold there. At the age of eleven, Tevis traveled alone across the US to join his family. Tevis attended Lexington High School, learned billiards and developed an affinity for science fiction novels.
At the age of 17, Tevis first learned the carpenter's trade and served on the USS Hamul, an American destroyer, in Okinawa. After his release from the Navy, he studied literature at University of Kentucky. After completing his undergraduate degree, he taught various subjects, from sports to science to literature at several smaller Kentucky schools, and began writing short stories for The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and Playboy.
His first novel was The Hustler, published in 1959 by Harper & Row. The Man Who Fell to Earth followed in 1963. Tevis joined Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, teaching English and Creative Writing for 14 years. In 1978, he moved to New York and started to write again. He has published four novels: Mockingbird, The Steps of the Sun, The Queen's Gambit and The Color of Money, as well as a collection of short stories: Far From Home. In 1984, Tevis died of lung cancer. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.
ChessBase editor Johannes Fischer's 2003 essay for the German chess magazine Karl, as well as his blog Schöner Schein deals with the representation of chess players in the literature, not only in Tevis, but in general. The summary of his observations reads as follows:
Meeting chess players in literature or films is not always a pleasure. They often claim to be able to calculate 50 moves ahead or to remember 100,000 variations but fail to know the proper names of the openings they play. In films they often get the starting position wrong and touch the pieces like a non-smoker a cigarette. They talk about Lasker, Capablanca and Alekhine like a philosophy student in the first semester talks about Heidegger and Wittgenstein and their knowledge of chess history usually ends just before World War II — unless they talk about Fischer. Pleasant people are rare among them. The sensitive are crazy or will soon become so, and the more robust use their minds to plan perfidious crimes.
Though Johannes Fischer likes "The Queen's Gambit" in general he is not particularly happy about the way chess players are depicted and thinks that the many inaccuracies in the novel spoil the pleasure:
A happy end in a novel about chess, that is rare. But why does “The Queen’s Gambit” still evoke ambiguous feelings in the reader? Is it the presentation of the game that despite all suspense it creates still seems to be too naïve at times? Though it seems familiar when Beth feels unexpected and strong moves of her opponents in her stomach and develops aggressions against them, and though the portraits Tevis draws of chess players and their mannerisms are reminiscent of characters you meet at every larger open, it is odd that in Tevis’ description of chess games it seems to be the most important to remember as many opening moves as possible and to know that you are playing the Löwenfisch variation. Moreover, the representation of the tournament scene in America, in which Beth after a few successes is already considered as an American Champion, also remains oddly abstract.
We'll see if Netflix can manage to hire a chess consultant to address some of the novel's shortcomings.
Correction May 10: Tevis' novel The Man Who Fell to Earth was published in 1963; the film came out in 1976, not 1978.
Translation from German: Macauley Peterson
