You’d probably spill your drink laughing at a drama featuring a prodigal sprinter running 5 seconds 100 metres races.
To go to the lengths they went to create something apparently realistic and then ruin it like that was stupid.
I’d accept a draw if doing so puts me in the money and a loss would not. This would be in the last round where the win is not clear.
Jal likes talking out of his ass. Of course a 2750 player could potentially beat three 2500s in a speed simul.
She also might really be a 2800-2900 (Magnus is a 2882) player at that point for her time. There’s no way to be sure that they’re 2500’s and she’s a 2750. I didn’t find it implausible, but I did take the show at it’s word that it understood how insanely good you would have to beat 3 of the US top 5 in a speed simul repeatedly. Good enough to go beat the Soviet machine the next winter. Bobby Fischer at the height of his powers good.
The GMs on chess.com disagree with you but no doubt they’re wrong. 
Fischer categorically could NOT have done that against GM level players.
It’s a TV show dude. It’s not impossible therefore it can happen and you don’t have to work that hard to suspend your disbelief. The Sopranos got me to suspend my disbelief that a top 5 mafia figure under constant FBI surveillance would hit a guy with a car and beat the daylights out of him in front of 10+ witnesses to collect a debt of literally any size.
We’ve all tolerated way worse. The way I dealt with the size of the accomplishment was to stop seeing her as the underdog from that point on as long as she didn’t hit the booze and pills too hard.
Honestly one of my favorite things about QG is that it tells a story that pretty cleanly checks out from start to finish. If someone like Elizabeth Harmon arrived on the scene that’s pretty close to how it would go. Very few fictional works get anywhere close to having a believable line… which sucks when your brain works like mine.
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Kasparov, who consulted on the show and chose many of the games for the international matches, said it was unlikely but possible
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It’s a story about a real legit no shit prodigy. The really rare 1 in a million+ kind. As a result there IS a degree of superhero story about it.
I will say that books that do the prodigy as superhero story definitely hurt my perception of reality. I genuinely believed that there were quite a few people out there operating on an incomprehensibly high level… and there just aren’t. There are smart people of different types… but they compress a lot toward the top and the real difference maker is having a good mix of strong results not being off the charts in one type of intelligence.
But things like chess, math, physics, and a few others really are all about candlepower and there absolutely are people who have a shitload of it. Perhaps the most overestimated group of people on earth, especially by themselves.
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If she had a rating of 3500, maybe. I mean if we’re in that fantasy land of super heros, sure but I thought the whole point of the series was naturalism. That’s the nature of the quibble here - the contradiction between naturalism and fantasy and the series being inconsistent.
If she really had a rating that high why did she need a team to help with the adjourned analysis?
I absolutely agree about the needing a team to help part being imcompatible with the speed chess part. Benny would probably be good enough to help her out some, but the rest? No freaking way. I mean I get that they’re basically just acting as a primitive chess computer and they have unlimited time to work out all the lines… But still.
If it’s important, I think we could say that two of them are GMs, but I don’t think the guy who loved chess problems has to be a GM. He could be an 1800 guy who only likes one aspect.
I kept rolling my eyes when she has already become this really accomplished player who doesn’t know what speed chess is, or other basic concepts. But they’re obviously having her be unreasonably clueless at an advanced point so they can tell the audience what it is.
Anyway, my daughter and I enjoyed it and it looks like I’ll be teaching her to play this weekend.
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I think this is going to be popular for a long time because of stuff like this. It’s infinitely compelling without knowing much about chess beyond basic rules, and the series will take on increasing significance as it inspires more people to learn how to play.
Could be time for us to rebrand as a chess forum and take advantage of all of those poker players looking for their next big score.
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Yeah I mean if you think about it…
Kasparov rated ~2800 then dismantling 6 ex Soviet GMs rated 2500-2600 in a simul (class time control), 5.5-0.5, absolute monster of a performance.
Her beating 3 x 2500 rated players 9-0 in blitz is qualitatively far superior because she has almost no time to think.
My daughter already knows the piece movements–I taught her that when she was very young. But she’s scary smart and thinks she’s gonna be the next World Champ in a year or two. I’ve already told my wife to hide the benzos.
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Your daughter already found them.
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The thing about Beth is that it’s not an impossible story. Like sure, her background supposedly makes it unlikely, but Judith Polgar was world class at like 11 years old. I watched a 13 year old German kid ruin Boris Gelfand in a match. Obviously Carlsen already beat Karpov at 13.
This isn’t really a superhero story when it comes to chess, which is also a pretty cool feature of chess that doesn’t exist in many other fields. Maybe something like classical pianists is similar, but probably less entertaining.
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Wait though.
Polgar was not world class at 11 - at 12 she was 2555, not close to what I’d take to be world class ie top 10 or 20.
13 year old Carlsen beating Karpov was a tremendous feat but it was a blitz game, not Karpov’s strongest format.
Yeah but Beth was ~15 when she won the Kentucky championship in the show. All I meant was that it’s not that unheard of. That is actually more to your point that the blitz scene wasn’t realistic.
Polgar was competing successfully at much higher level of competitions than that at age 12.
Right, and she was actually 17 (because she’s two years older than everyone thinks after she leaves the orphanage).
All this just makes me appreciate more what Kasparov did to the Israeli nation team of GMs.
Looking it up I was wrong - he played 8 games simultaneously against them, winning 6 and drawiing 2 for a 7-1 score lol.
These were strong GMs like Sutovsky and Smirin and he had a fraction of the time they had. This must be one of the most impressive chess performances of all time.
I remember when he’d just won the world title he played a match against Britain’s first GM Tony Miles (2600 ish), winning it 5.5- 0.5.
Miles afterwards said something like “I thought I was going to be playing the world champion, not some 27 eyed monster that sees everything”.