I'm giving this show 5 stars because, as a fiction story, it is entertaining and because I can tell that there was a significant effort to put together the right environment of the 1950s and 1960s. Cars, music, chess clocks, chess books and others were mostly the right ones, with a few mistakes here and there. I even notice, for example, that when Beth Harmon opens a magazine, one name printed is Panov and Vasily Panov was a well-known international master active during those years.

Regardless of the story and attention to environmental details, the series is very wrong about professional chess and that's why I'm taking 5 stars from the score. It is supposed to be a story around chess, but it is too far from reality.

Beth combines characteristics of top players and champions such as Morphy, Alekhine, Capablanca and Fischer. Maybe the author considered other players, but I can notice characteristics of the four players mentioned. I will not describe similitudes because I cannot do it without many spoilers. Still, that combination makes Beth a superhuman, impossible character. She either wins or losses, but the most common result in chess among grandmasters is "draw." Grandmasters do not go to a top level tournament and win every single game. She is described as a female Bobby Fischer but, as a clear example, Fischer became world champion after beating Boris Spassky in a match with 21 games: 11 games ended in a draw (noticed that it is slightly more than half) and Fischer started the match with a loss. Can you tell the difference? In the real world, top players struggle a lot to win against each other.

Because someone beats a janitor, chess club trainers will not be interested in that person. Because someone wins a game against a club player, that person is not invited to play simultaneous games. Players don't win their first tournaments and become known by the chess community overnight. Professional players (and almost any player) know that drugs kill your games, even eating the wrong food before a game interferes with your lucidity to play. I've been playing chess since I was 8 years-old and I feel very disappointed by the way The Queen's Gambit treat chess.

Finally, the story is written to attract Americans and especially American females. I'm not American and, probably, my grammar tells you that English is not my native language. U.S. players were not outstanding at chess during the years of the story. Bobby Fischer was the exception, and he is one person, not the entire country. Soviet players (it was the Soviet Union until 1991) were by far the best. From 1948 till 1991 all champions were Soviets except Fischer. Soviets were followed by European players. U.S. players were far behind. The strongest female player of all times is Judit Polgar, and she is Hungarian. I do not remember a single notorious American female player. A character like Beth Harmon never existed, especially because she is so exaggerated that even Bobby Fischer looks opaque next to her abilities.

Overall, the story is amusing as fiction but not a bit credible about the life of chess masters. Netflix did well involving Kasparov and Pandolfini as consultants to make games look realistic, unfortunately their influence was on chess sets, game positions, jargon and not on the story itself because the story came from an American novel.