Catching Fire

In the wake of the success of the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, this evening Christiane Amanpour hosted two non-fictional chess guests at her CNN International’s nightly interview program Amanpour, namely, 13th World Chess Champion Garry Kimovich Kasparov and the all-time women’s No. 1 Judit Polgár, a woman who, in her prime, ranked as high as number eight in the world. In a very relaxed atmosphere, they discussed the gender gap in the chess world, both before and after their epoch. They both agreed that life is not a film, and especially Mrs. Polgár, who, like the anti-heroine of The Queen’s Gambit, has soft auburn hair, but who, unlike Beth Harmon, never encountered opponents as chivalrous as Vasily Borgov: “When I first won against the first grandmaster, he was handling it pretty badly... he was hitting his head into the elevator”, she said. Pictured above are Polgár and Kasparov playing each other at the 18th SuperGM Linares Chess Tournament in Linares, Spain, in February 2001. Photo: Enrique Alonso/AFP.