Log 4_The Queen's Gambit

 

In the part I read this week, some professional word usage in chess started to pop out, which increased the difficulty of understanding the story. As a result, I decided to learn some basic rules of chess, and found it more complicated than I thought. I learned the names of the pieces, the initial setup of the pieces on the chessboard, how a game starts, how a game ends, and some basic movements, such as the fool’s mate (a movement emphasizing the importance of f2, a square on the chessboard) and the scholar’s mate (a movement emphasizing the importance of f7, a square on the chessboard). I am not able to play chess with the knowledge I learned, but that allows me to have a basic understanding to chess, and I can at least have a picture in my mind when Beth is playing chess with someone in the story.

However, knowing the names of the pieces and the movements seemed not enough to really understand the scenes in the story. I found something about The Queen’s Gambit on the Internet. In one online article (后翼棄兵 (The Queen's Gambit) 劇名背後的隱喻), It was mentioned that this story was trying to convey the meaning of losing and gaining. The queen’s gambit is a movement by which you will lose one pawn (兵), but gain the control of some other squares on the chessboard. In that way, you lost one piece, but you actually have higher chances to win the game.

There seems to be more movements like the queen’s gambit in the rules of chess. It is thought-provoking to read this online article after I read some parts of the story. When I was reading the story (and watching the series on Netflix as well), I didn’t have a strong feeling that the whole story was trying to convey the idea of losing and gaining. However, when I got the idea from the online article, it was surprising. Even from the boardgame rules, some principles of life could be conveyed. That encourages me to pay more attention on every single incident, conversation, and person in my life, perhaps some of them, or all of them, are trying to convey some principles of life to me.