5 Reasons why the success of Netflix's The Queen's Gambit is good for the Industry

In this SPECIAL REPORT by INFOPLAY we would like to focus on 5 of the reasons why we can consider the success achieved by the production of Netflix "Queen's Gambit"  ("Gambito de Dama" in Spain and LATAM countries) is good for our Sector, one of the few dramatic products about a game -chess- where the reason for the conflicts and the fall of the main character is not the game itself.

And it is that in Queen´s Gambit we can observe how the self-destructive behaviors that condemn the protagonist for a long time are not related to the obsession with the game of chess but we can find numerous causes in experiences especially in the childhood of Beth Harmon -the protagonist main of the show-.

In any case, we will leave for the last of the 5 sections of this review everything related to the love-hate relationship of the protagonist with chess; pointing out 4 other much more comforting reasons that should make us happy for the enormous acceptance of "Queen´s Gambit" that remains from the date of its premiere as the most watched series in many countries.

1- The role of women in a Play environment

Seeing a woman as the main heroine of a Netflix production should come as no surprise. There are numerous productions on the platform that are starred by women, something that extends to the traditional film industry "made in Hollywood" that in the last decade especially is giving great relevance to women in the most successful sagas of superheroes and fictional like Star Wars.

The plot of Queen´s Gambit (Gambito de Dama) revolves around the complicated and demanding life, on and off the boards, of its main character, a young chess player who certainly does not fit into a world as "manly" as the one described at the time ( the 1960s). A reality that allows us to reflect on the role of women in our sector and that, as in practically all facets, is characterized by an increasing presence in the gaming world. And, as has happened with chess, with figures like Judith Polgar, the new role of women not only as a player but also as an active part of the gambing/gambling Industry has served to give an important boost to it.

As was said at the debate table "Women at Play" of the AGEO Congress of 2017, what until recently was known as "the challenge of equality" in subsectors closely related to Gambling such as technology, has been overcome since both at the consumer level and at the professional level, the idea that there is little female presence in the industry has disappeared with the data in hand, with an industry that develops measures against the gender gap and that increasingly has women in mind in all the facets that make it up.

Thus, as we will reinforce in the next section, the X-ray of the Queen's Gambit show to that part of the reality of is magnificent, because the women that we can find in the world of chess, as happens in the reality of other games such as poker they are strong and tenacious people and -although perhaps still a minority in number-, they manage with their presence to improve the global situation, even in a scenario as hostile as that of the 60s ...


2- The obvious parallels with poker

It is a mistake to think that all gambling games are games of chance. Many times it is ignored that although luck plays a more important factor than any skill, the applied strategy - even in casino games like Blackjack - is fundamental. Something that is undeniably proven in poker modalities such as Texas Holdem or Omaha.

In Queen's Gambit, competitive chess is discussed and the journey from amateur to professional level is seen ... something that refers us to the format of poker tournaments, a reality very similar to that of chess tournaments, where in both cases the participants They pay an entry price and the overall winner receives the prize pool. A reality that we even find in Spanish casinos with roulette or blacjkack tournaments, where those who finish with the highest position in the tournament will also obtain a percentage of the prize collected with the entries.

We also find reflected in the series what the life of the professional player is like, something in which poker and chess also have enormous similarities with travel, luxury, relationships with people you meet on the circuit, rivalry...


3 - The game as the perfect setting for an audiovisual product

The series has received praise from the chess community for its interpretation of the game and the players, something that also happened with Rounders (1998), the cult film associated with the poker boom of the early 21st century with Matt Damon, Edward Norton and John Malkovich as the main protagonists.

But in the case of Queen´s Gambit, the bet on the game of chess was safe, not in vain the series is based on a novel by Walter Trevis, author of the novels that inspired two films that are considered paradigmatic examples of how cinema You can use a game to build arguments and set the perfect setting for a fiction: 1986's The Color of Money and 1961's The Hustler. The first directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Tom Cruise and Paul Newman, which was precisely the continuation of the story of Eddie "Lightning" Felson, the protagonist of the second, "The Hustler" with Newman as the protagonist and Robert Rossen in the direction.

Undoubtedly, there are two cases of films in which the game, in this case billiards and gambling, ceases to be just a crime novel plot and becomes a genre in itself, almost sports.

Later, the game managed to attract numerous directors to locate plots of all kinds such as Rainman (Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman), Casino Royale, Runner Runner ... or in a different background with Oceans Eleven or The Gambler ... although perhaps the film that best stands the comparison with Queen's Gambit would be the aforementioned Rounders, where poker is what Chess would be in Queen's Gambit and the figure of the protagonist Beth is divided between the roles of Matt Damon and Edward Norton, representing the two faces of an elite player.

In both works, they share the virtue of showing the game -poker and chess- in a very realistic way, with the pros and cons and where the viewer is largely trapped by the world of chess and competitive poker.

Also in Queen´s Gambit, a period production, we can see the city of Las Vegas as a setting, a common location for Hollywood cinema, in this case hosting the United States Chess Championship; something that should remind us that in casinos also events of this mental sport are held regularly; case for example of Casino Barcelona and its Chess Tournament Magistral Casino de Barcelona (Casino Barcelona Masters) among others.


But the concept "audiovisual" nowadays mainly means YouTube, Twitch or Tik Tok ... which leads us to think that with those seen in Queen's Gambit we can confirm that poker and chess fit very well as virtual entertainment.

We are verifying it in the enormous amount of content that Queen's Gambit is generating in social networks, where mainly the chess player communities have found in the series the perfect framework for interaction and showing new ways of learning their game.


4 - The game to explain social reality

Narrating the reality of the Cold War between the Soviet bloc and the United States through the exciting life of Bobby Fisher was recurrent for several decades in the West; something that led chess in general and Fisher in particular to become icons of the United States after the triumph of the American in the 1972 World Cup in the so-called Reyjkavik (Iceland) game of the century against the Russian Grand Master Spassky.


The similarities in life in Beth Harmon's fiction and in Bobby Fisher's real life are obvious; especially in the scenes of the last episode when the young American travels to Moscow to face the Grand Master of the USSR Vasily Borgov. Capitalism and communism faced off on a 64-cell board in an attempt to discern which of the two ways of presenting the world was the best ... a debate that in the game between Fisher and Spassky ended with the New Yorker's historic triumph after 40 years of Soviet dominance in the world chess championship and that demonstrates how chess, poker or the game in general has the capacity - as an inherent instrument in our way of living - to represent situations of all kinds.

And it is that witnessing the social and political evolution in such an interesting time through the Game is possible with this series, something that the world of cards, chips and bets has been very frequent with cases like The Cincinatti Kid (1965) or the innumerable Far West films ... where games have a fundamental role beyond a mere aesthetic resource.


5- Addictions: a phenomenon alien to the game itself

In many reviews about the series, it is said that Queen´s Gambit is the story of a path to self-destruction, which starts in the first scene and will accompany the protagonist until the seventh and last chapter. The truth is that throughout the entire production the numerous vicissitudes that the main character has had to go through are explained ...

So, on the one hand, a complex environment is added to the traditional figure of the "child prodigy" of chess in which substances such as tranquilizers, alcohol and other drugs serve as an escape for a reality of competitiveness and maximum pressure; However, we do not need to go to any psychology treatise to understand how the environment in which Beth grew up, where condemnable behaviors occur today - but which were common at that time - is the trigger for the situation that some viewers could relate to the chess.

And it is that as it happens with numerous addictions, the vulnerability to suffer them depends so much on psychological variables as biological and social, rejecting that the cause of the disorder is the own game. An important lesson for all; especially for those who perform superficial analyzes that ignore the complexity of the reality of these issues