You wouldn’t think that a young woman alone in a Moscow park with dozens of old men could make for a happy ending, but here we are, crying into our Cheerios over the poignant final moments of The Queen’s Gambit. When we last saw Beth Harmon, chess champion extraordinaire, she had triumphed over Vasily Borgov, the Russian world champion who had long been her professional white whale. Yet it wasn’t just Borgov she defeated—it was also the specter of her tormented past, which contributed to her dangerous dependency on drugs and alcohol. Leave it to our girl to shake off her demons and broker some Cold War-era peace while she’s at it. Yet if you’re not a chess player, you might be scratching your head about how it all went down on the board. Just how did Beth vanquish Borgov, whom other characters describe as an unbeatable Soviet chess machine, trained from childhood to wipe the floor with his competitors? The answer: she got by with a little help from her f… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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