Judit Polgar said that the two most unrealistic things about the show were 1) Beth's substance abuse problems would've made it absolutely impossible to compete at that level no matter what her natural talent, and 2) the sexism was WAY more common and blatant in real life
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When Polgar was coming up irl the sexist men did not self-censor, at all -- the show is actually back-dating a 21st century idea of "political correctness" into the 20th The gatekeeping wasn't implicit or covert, it was overt and it was meanhttps://www.ibtimes.com/queens-gambit-deja-vu-hungary-chess-champ-polgar-3099903 …
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Then-world champion Garry Kasparov called Polgar a "circus puppet" and said women were better off having families than trying careers they couldn't psychologically handle like competitive chess (Kasparov ended up apologizing, and is one of the consultants on the show)
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Hell here's UK grandmaster Nigel Short saying the same thing in the distant era of 2015https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3046374/Women-aren-t-smart-play-chess-game-requires-logical-thinking-says-British-grandmaster.html …
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Re: the story making Beth an addict It's blatantly unrealistic, and because it's unrealistic I think it is worth analyzing to a degree why it's there and whether it's gendered That to make her genius interesting Beth has to be really clearly badly damaged in some way
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I mean it's certainly not that there haven't been plenty of chess greats who were all kinds of messed up in their personal lives But the drinking and pill popping absolutely doesn't make sense (it's like portraying an NBA champion who gets drunk and hung over before a game)
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I don't recall the drinking before the game except the one game where she clearly blew it. But the thing about the tranquilizers holding self doubt at bay so she can focus on the game does seem a bit far fetched. ...
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What's weird is that they could easily have made them uppers and it would've fit period stereotypes and everything There were all these jokes from the '50s and '60s about how dexedrine ("dexys", "purple hearts", "French blues") were the wildly overprescribed "housewife's helper"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BruceMcF and
I guess that's the thing, if she were taking speed then it would actually feel like a performance enhancer, that she's cheating They wanted to go the opposite route, say that she's actually handicapping her skill to keep her emotional demons at bay
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BruceMcF and
Fun fact, when doping became a big deal at the Olympics etc they talked about whether FIDE should do drug testing The consensus was they shouldn't, because there's no illicit substance that would actually give you an objective advantage
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Although a lot of people joked about how if FIDE tried to officially ban caffeine and nicotine people would riot
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BruceMcF and
For reasons far beyond my knowledge, I've been told the only two legal athletic perfamce enhancing substances are caffeine and baking soda.
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Replying to @AugustFresnel @arthur_affect and
Armand Hammer had an inside track on getting Baking Soda approved, what with his influence in both the US and the Soviet Union.
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