In the hallowed halls of competitive, individual, indoor sports, the name Walter Tevis should be engraved and canonized.  Mr. Tevis, who died 36 years ago, was an American novelist and short story writer.  And while his corpus was limited with just six novels, the adaptations of half of those novels into movies have had profound cultural and economic impact on the sports he described.

Mr. Tevis first became famous in 1961 when his novel, The Hustler, published two years prior, became the basis for the award-winning film of the same name. The movie The Hustler not only amassed glorious critical reviews, but also resuscitated the billiard industry. Interest and participation in the sport skyrocketed. Allegedly, the number of pool rooms shot up from 4,000 to 19,000 in just five years; organized billiards boomed; and television sports first began to cover straight pool matches.^[1]

That kind of impact was unprecedented, but it turned out not to be unique. Fast-forward 23 years and Mr. Tevis’ sixth novel, The Color of Money, a sequel to The Hustler, was adapted into a movie of the same name by director Martin Scorsese in 1986.  And, once again, the billiards industry got its jump-start, albeit not at the same exponential level. Sales of pool tables and cue sticks rose.  According to global research firm A.C. Nielson, the number of players increased from 30 million to 35 million, and the sport attracted a more upscale demographic.^[2]

However, it was Mr. Tevis’ posthumous third act – the adaptation of his 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit into a seven-episode mini-series of the same name on Netflix in 2020 – that broke all the records. This time, it was not for billiards, but for another sport that is more sedentary, more dilatory, and more cerebral.  That sport was chess.

https://youtu.be/CDrieqwSdgI

Sixty two million households watched The Queen’s Gambit in its first 28 days, making it Netflix’s most watched limited series. Google search queries for “how to play chess” hit a nine-year all-time high. Inquiries for “chess set” increased 250% on eBay. US sales of chess sets increased 125%. New players on Chess.com increased five-fold.^[3]  Unsurprisingly, Mr. Tevis’ novel is now a New York Times bestseller…37 years after its initial publication!

Certainly, The Queen’s Gambit is not the first film about chess. As my brother, David Moss, has well documented on his website devoted to chess movies, the game has attracted moviegoers since Robert Paul created A Chess Dispute in 1903. Over the past century, prominent directors and actors have attached their names to chess films, from Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal) and Catherine Deneuve (The Chess Game) to Samuel L. Jackson (Fresh) and Ben Kingsley (Searching for Bobby Fischer).

Yet, none of those movies remotely had an impact on the industry as comparable to The Queen’s Gambit. Why did this show about an orphaned girl who becomes one of the top chess players in the world, despite her addiction to pills and alcohol, reach number one on Netflix in 63 countries?^[4]

One reason is the series respect for the sport of chess. Former world champion Garry Kasparov, a consultant to The Queen’s Gambit, ensured the creators avoided pitfalls of past films, including unrealistic movements and blatant transgressions, such as boards oriented incorrectly. Real matches were often the basis for those in the series. Tension was created, precisely by investing in the nuances of the game, rather than skipping to the flash (the equivalent of the deplorable overreliance on trick shots in billiard films). And, the characters, from the protagonist Beth Harmon to the supporting cast to the Russian nemeses, were complex, not two-dimensional cut-outs.  Of course, it also helped that The Queen’s Gambit was about seven hours in length and released during a pandemic.

I’m thrilled by the success of The Queen’s Gambit, but I can’t help wishing Mr. Tevis’ hat trick had culminated with one more adrenaline shot to the billiards industry. Since The Color of Money, billiards has not fared well on the silver screen, and its popularity among younger players is waning.

The Queen’s Gambit proves you don’t need an A-list actor, an exorbitant budget, a screenplay based on a best seller, or a prolonged marketing campaign to create high-quality viewing. Most important, you don’t need to dumb down the sport or reduce it to stereotypes and caricatures.  If we can avoid these lazy cinematic tropes in future billiards films, that’s a gambit worth taking.

This article was originally written for and printed in BCA Insider (February 1, 2021).

[1]      “Movie is Chalking Up Renewed Interest in Pool,” Los Angeles Times, November 23, 1986.

[2]      “Upscale? Maybe, But Pool’s Pool,” Chicago Tribune, December 1, 1989.

[3]      “From the Queen’s Gambit to a Record-Setting Checkmate,” Netflix, November 23, 2020.

[4]      Ibid.