The Queen's Gambit


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My wife and I watched the show a few weeks ago and we both liked it a lot. I am a former tournament player, though never at a master level. My wife doesn’t even know the rules of chess, but she found the show fascinating.

My first chess book as a child was about chess prodigies: Morphy, Reshevski, Capablanca, Fischer, among others. I loved the many references to Morphy and Capablanca in the show. This really brought back memories so I had to go dig up the book (I lost the cover but the rest of the book is still intact).

The only nit I had regarding game play was the banging of the moves and the clock, and how fast she would move sometimes. Otherwise, a very enjoyable watch!

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Watching it with my daughter (on last ep), who has been on the phone for the past two days bitching to her friends that I never taught her to play chess when she was younger.

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Yeah I also paused the ep at this point and googled about this.

Nah, you can cold turkey low doses and be fine, just like you can drink half a bottle of wine a night for years and then just stop and be fine.

The chess magazine in a small town drugstore magazine rack did actually strain credulity.

The angle of Townes being gay was also kinda weird and undeveloped.

Never too late to start imo

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I’m learning chess now just for the purpose of teaching my son in a year or two

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I’ll put this here or it can go in the chess thread but chess.com has a beat Beth Harmon bot up

https://www.chess.com/play/computer?bot=Beth8-bot

It’s not anything special, I beat age 15 relatively easily, for 1880 her endgame play is like sub 1000. But next bot is age 17 2400, no thanks.

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Same. I don’t think that’s really 1880 level.

I’m trying to beat the age 9 bot :joy:

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I am clearly the best ever. Eat shit Mr. Schaibel

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I also beat the 1880 bot pretty easily, it’s nothing like 1880, but bots are mega annoying to play and you have to be patient and careful.

OK Beth whatever you say.

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More work might be needed

It seems at the very least she will always have a home with Shaymalan

By the way, we had no idea this was Dudley Dursley until after we finished the series. Dude lost a ton of weight

I mean, that’s essentially what happened in the show. A fall like that onto exposed glass could totally kill or comaize a kid.

WTF I didn’t recognize him either. Good job Dudley!

I’ve heard similar about tennis players. That essentially unranked and even lower ranked players have a statistically zero percent chance of winning a set against a top pro, sometimes down to not having a chance in as little as a single game or even a point.

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The 2400 bot is also not even in the same universe as 2400, I just drew it and probably should have won. Wound up in an annoying pawn-up same colour bishop ending where I don’t think there was any way to make progress. Had to draw by repetition.