Everyone seems to be praising The Queen's Gambit, but we found someone who doesn’t like the it. Journalist and screenwriter Elena Vanina, co-author of the script for The Last Minister and Londongrad TV series, has joined the podcast “What to watch”. She criticizes the Netflix hit for being soft: the hero of the series, a brilliant chess player, copes with drug addiction too easily. She surprisingly fast gets out of the binge cycle, and immediately after the death of her stepmother, she started her home redecoration.Journalist and chess player Maksim Andreev explains why The Queen's Gambit is one of the few projects where chess is shown not only in an exciting way, but also correctly as a professional game (the series was consulted by Garry Kasparov).
But there are other opinions. Explosive interest in chess all over the world was aroused by The Queen's Gambit released on Netflix at the end of October. The chess community was exited. This was reported by the Australian edition of The Business Insider on November 22.
Recall that The Queen's Gambit, in which the starring role was played by Anya Taylor-Joy, is based on the novel of the same name by the US writer Walter Tevis published in 1983.
As shown by Google Trends for the last 12 months, in the week after the release of the series in the US, UK and other countries, the number of searches on Google for the word "chess" has increased worldwide.
The online reseller eBay reported that the enquiries on chess sets increased by 273% in the 10 days after the TV series was released. Many chess clubs record a sharp influx of people wishing to master this sport.
The restrictions associated with the coronavirus pandemic have already begun to fuel interest in online chess, as people around the world are looking for inexpensive, remote forms of leisure, but the real chess boom started just after the series was released.
