Netflix's "The Queen's Gambit" is bringing a new generation of women and girls to the sport. This chess champion welcomes the company...
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00:00I definitely heard over the years, people kind of like jokingly refer to the chess queen
00:04as chess bitch, the bitch of the board.
00:07It's almost like a negative that she's so powerful, where you know, in reality, we all
00:11know that everything gets better when you add more powerful women.
00:24My main competition when I was a kid and a teenager were boys and men.
00:29Just because the sport is so dominated by men and boys, I think a lot of times people
00:34were excited to see me because there were fewer girls and women in the game.
00:39So I got a lot of, you know, support and happiness that there was a girl who was like crushing
00:45the boys.
00:46So I got a lot of positive attention.
00:48But then, of course, there was also some harassment and negative attention or, you know, comments
00:55about how women or girls couldn't be as good as boys.
00:59I was being on board one and they'd be like, you're on the wrong board, you're supposed
01:01to be on board five.
01:02And I'd be like, no, I am the top rated player on this team.
01:11The first women's world champion was Vera Menchik.
01:14And she unfortunately died by a bomb in London in World War Two.
01:19She was actually the first female in the history of chess to compete at the top level with
01:24the top men of her day.
01:26And people were so upset when she beat them that they called it a Vera Menchik club.
01:31So anybody who lost to her during this supposedly, you know, shameful club.
01:38And since then, there's been some other incredible women through the history of chess, like Judith
01:43Polgar, who's also a redhead, loved to see it.
01:48And she is the only woman in history who's made the top 10 players of all time.
01:53So she is a real hero to many of us.
02:10Since the Queen's Gambit came out, we've been getting a lot of inquiries from young women
02:16and senior women, grown up women for the most part, adults who are interested in learning
02:21the game or reigniting their passion for it.
02:25It's such a massive pop culture success, that now when people think of chess, they might
02:30think of, you know, a redheaded Ann Huttell or Joy, which I love as somebody who's had
02:38red hair for quite a while now.
02:41I'm quite appreciative of how it portrayed a chess player.
02:46And I think it has a lot of strong messages for men, too, that sometimes, you know, that
02:52you should, you know, respect what a woman is doing.
02:56And sometimes you can be the one supporting their career rather than all the imagery we
02:59see of vice versa.
03:01You have so much to learn from women.
03:03The numbers are definitely rising, whether it's online chess, you know, the numbers reported
03:19at Chess.com are showing a big spike in female membership.
03:24The numbers at US Chess have risen a lot in terms of females also, but it's still not
03:30as much as I'd like it to be.
03:31We still have so much work to be done because there's so much that girls and women can learn
03:37from chess.
03:43Chess takes you into this whole other world where you're completely non-distracted and
03:48you don't have to think about what other people think of you or how you look.
03:53And that is such an important lesson, I think, especially for teen girls, where they're being
03:57like bombarded with messages and advertising and social media notifications, that if we
04:03can teach them how to escape into their own mind, it's priceless.