I spent the last 3 days binging The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. It’s a drama about an orphan chess prodigy named Beth Harmon and her quest to become the world’s greatest chess player.
Spoilers ahead!
In the final episode, “End Game”, Beth plays her final match against her arch nemesis, the Soviet world champion Vasily Borgov. It’s the Queen’s Gambit ending everyone talks about, and the best Borgov chess you’ll see in the series. From the show’s Wikipedia, we learn that Garry Kasparov and chess coach Bruce Pandolfini acted as consultants, so that the actual games seem realistic.
Together with Lichess’s computer analysis I go over the Queen’s Gambit final game, Harmon vs Borgov, and try to analyze it. I’m a chess enthusiast, and not very good, so I thought this would be a great way to sharpen my skills and learn a thing or two. I hope you enjoy this analysis from a beginner’s perspective.
🫒 Every grandmaster needs a good opening. Mine is a tablespoon of olive oil in the morning. Get your Specialty Extra Virgin Olive Oil at attimo-oil.com, and use code JELLE20 for 20% off.
A part of the game was not shown in the show, so I tried to be smart and deduce what happened, and I think I’m not that far off! But more on that later.
Analysis
After researching this game, I found out on Twitter that it was based on a game from 1993. The specific game is Ivanchuk vs Wolff at the 1993 Biel Interzonal. On Chessgames.com you can check it out.
It starts out with Beth playing , which makes sense, as it’s the start of the Queen’s Gambit opener. The complete Queen’s Gambit starts with 1. d4 , which are indeed the next moves. It’s remarkable that in all the other games, Beth always played 1. e4.
Borgov then has the option to either accept the gambit by playing
After , Beth’s center pawn is under a double attack by both the Queen and the Knight. This is why she decided to bring the Bishop into it to defend the center pawn with . Borgov plays .
Then it’s , again defending the other center pawn on e4, followed by , putting the pawn on d4 under more and more stress.
By playing , Harmon gains more space in the center, and attacks Borgov’s knight which has to move. Borgov plays . The stockfish engine on Lichess says this is an inaccuracy, as might’ve been a better choice it says. Who am I to go against a chess algorithm, but 6…Ne7 seems okay as you still have your knight in the center of the board where it’s more dangerous.
Beth replies by capturing the pawn on c4 by playing , followed by Borgov repositioning his retreated knight to
By playing , Harmon has a very strong center with the diagonal pawns. Over the next few moves, both players keep developing their pieces: .
Borgov plays , planning to develop the queen side of the board, planning b5 later on. In anticipation to this, Beth removes her bishop from c4 by playing , which is indeed followed by
Players continue developing, with a little attack by Elizabeth first: .
Beth brings her Rook into position by playing . Borgov brings his Knight to the sides with . From this point you can see that the tension is building, particularly on the f4 file, with Borgov’s 2 knights, the e5 pawn and the bishop.
Harmon strengthens the f4 square by pushing the g2 pawn up with . Vasily Borgov continues to build his positioning with this.
This is followed up by and a simple exchange with . This quick exchange is fairly normal, followed by Beth’s Ra1 move to get control over the A-line, possibly later bringing the rook to a7 where it is defended by the bishop on e3.
According to Stockfish, Vasily’s Ra8 move was another small inaccuracy, where Borgov’s move was purely intended to block Beth from going Ra7 straight away. Playing would most likely result in Rf2 according to Stockfish, but it’s not entirely clear to me why. Any suggestions here?
Instead the game continues with , first Harmon putting pressure on the b5 pawn, but Vasily pinning the knight to the queen, thus making it immovable.
Then we get rook captures with
Beth moves her queen to , thus removing the pin on the knight and now the pawn on b5 is again under attack. Because the queen isn’t guarding the bishop on e3 anymore, Borgov plays . This means that Beth can’t go after the b5 pawn anymore because imagine she does: , Borgov captures 2 bishops and Beth only gets a bishop and a pawn. So what she needs to do is find a way to defend the bishop on e3. She can’t capture the bishop on c5 either (), because Borgov recaptures with check and gaining control of the center with the Queen.
Instead, Elizabeth plays , so she defends the Bishop on e3. The pawn on b5 is not being attacked anymore with the knight gone. Now Borgov either has to move the bishop on c5 to a safe place or go for the trade with . However this is not a good idea, because then Beth brings the Knight on d1 into play, and now this knight has a lot of space to move to.
Instead Borgov goes for , retreating the bishop to a safer place.
Beth’s next move, is considered another inaccuracy, as Stockfish suggests . But Nf2 improves the position of the knight so this seems reasonable to me.
Then we get the first really interesting and beautiful move of the game. , basically suggesting to Harmon to capture it.
In fact, Lichess’ engine suggests that the knight should be captured by .
The thing is, by doing this you get a whole different game, where white will position itself into a position where it will have to defend, because we have Black’s queen and bishops on the right lines to go for the attack then.
Beth not being the defensive kind of player decided to ignore the knight on f4 and plays , ignoring Borgov’s request to go for a trade.
Borgov continues the attack with . Now you can see that Borgov is preparing the attack and also that the bishop on e3 is still a minor problem for Elizabeth. When the black kngith on f4 moves later on, the bishop on e3 is undefended and could be captured by the queen.
The next moves are . Elizabeth doesn’t allow Borgov to check her with a Nh3 move. With the Qh5 move Borgov again leaves the knight undefended, but capturing it would be a terrible mistake and an awful play by Elizabeth resulting in a checkmate:
The mating line:
Instead what Elizabeth does is , and the knight goes for the capture on d3 by .
We get a recapture with . Borgov then pushed the pawn .
Then Harmon puts the pressure on Borgov with , threatening to capture the bishop on d7. An exchange would not be beneficial to Borgov, so he moves his bishop away to .
is for in case the f-file opens up, as it’s more valuable there than on the c-file for now.
The next move, , moves the pressure back on the pawn. There’s not so much Borgov can do, and he goes for the capture with . We get a recapture with the pawn by Beth, and the queen to g6 disallows her to go capture the pawn on b5, as it would ultimately let the pawn on e3 be open for capture by black and letting him gain advantage.
On move 32 both parties improve the position of their kings, with . Especially the white king now has more wiggle room to move around.
, is a move by both parties to prepare the attack. On the previous spots the knights were somewhat out of play and you can see that they both want to reposition their knights.
Beth does so by , attacking the queen. This was an inaccuracy it seems, as was statistically a better move.
Now Borgov wanted to move his knight to f6, but with the attack on the queen he first has to bring her to safety. He does this by playing .
Beth moves her knight to f5, with , really positioning it very well in the center with a lot of defenders (pawn, queen, rook). Also by this, the black bishop on c8 is looking rather odd, with no place to go.
We get by Borgov, where Stockfish would’ve added the rook on a8 into play by
Anyway, so now Beth finally plays the pawn to h3 () (which was suggested by Stockfish a little bit earlier). But this time it really adds to the game because it adds more pressure to the queen, thus letting Beth keeping the pressure on Borgov and leaving him in a “responding” state where he constantly has to respond to Beth’s moves by moving his queen instead of really playing the moves he wants to play.
This is also the point where Borgov decides to adjourn the game. Fun fact: adjourning is not something that is done anymore in chess, because it can of course be used to analyse the game over the night (with a chess engine like Stockfish). We see in the show that both Borgov and Beth do analyse the game with fellow chess players, which would be a little bit cheating nowadays.
When they resume the play the day after, the move Borgov wrote on the piece of paper was .
Remember when I told you previously that this game was based on another game that was played in real life? It’s actually up to this point the games are the same. But because the real life game ended up in a draw, and that would be a lousy ending for the show, the Beth plays another move.
She goes , and Borgov brings his rook into the game with , going after the e4 pawn, the center of the white position.
Elizabeth plays , which is actually such a wonderful move, basically telling Borgov “what you want to do?”. The pressure is on Borgov, he can go for the check, capture the e4 pawn with rook or knight, etc.
Borgov decided to capture the central pawn on e4 () that’s been the foundation of Beth’s whole position.
Beth plays , essentially going for the future fork, by playing the knight to f8. However Borgov ancticipates this and captures the troublemaker by playing
By doing this, Harmon can advance her pawn, which is exactly what she does with , but she loses her last knight with .
She doesn’t wait and advances the pawn further, , being only one file away from promotion. However as you can see promotion would be useless, because the e8 square is protected by the black knight and queen, so Borgov doesn’t have to worry about that - for now. He instead plays , so that his rook gets extra protection, as Elizabeth could easily get distract his knight and queen.
It’s at this point that Elizabeth starts her ceiling analysis, as at this point she is on her own, and the d5 move is such a powerful move that she needs to consider her next options.
Elizabeth responds by playing the equally beautiful , preparing the advancement of the white b-pawn and defending the e-pawn on its current spot. Black really doesn’t have a lot of possible plays here. Moving the rook is out of the question because white can easily trade queens and capture the knight with the rook in order to promote the pawn.
So black decided to play .
White plays , as the pawn on b5 is defended by the queen anyway now.
, to attack the bishop and to defend the bishop.
And then we get the first big mistake of the game. The only correct move would be , basically waiting for white to see what they’re gonna do, but he decides to play .
It’s also around this time Borgov offers a draw which is declined by Beth. And rightfully so.
for the check.
Now Borgov has some options. A possible option would be 45…Kg8, but in a few moves this can lead to this situation which is basically game over for him:
Instead he plays
And here Elizabeth shows how good she is at chess.
This is the current situation:
And she decides to play the wonderful move of , sacrificing her queen. We get the expected sequence of .
Borgov advances his queen to , assumingly trying to go for the attack with the rook. The expected check with the rook is coming with , and black moves the king to
Elizabeth promotes the pawn to a queen ().
From this point on it requires some speculation because it’s not 100% clear what happened in the meantime. This is what they showed in the episode.
We can see that the black rook is gone, and the black queen captures the h3 pawn and came down to the second line.
What I assume happened is the following:
The only way black can win now is if he can make Elizabeth make a mistake and let her move her king towards the black pawns. But she decides to block the threat with the rook.
At this point we have the position where we are in now.
We then get , assuming that Borgov was hoping Elizabeth did not see the overwhelming advantage she had and would love to go for some draw instead.
But luckily she kept her cool and slowly played the last move of the game:
Borgov has no way to attack the white king in any way: either the rook or the bishop blocks it. The only thing left for him to do is to resign and let Beth become the world champion, which he did.
Analysing a game afterwards is fun but also of course a lot easier with a chess engine next to you. There’s of course no way I would’ve lasted than 15 moves against either fictional player 😅.
If you haven’t seen the show yet, it’s a Netflix original so it will probably be indefinitely on Netflix. However, if you like chess, I must say it’s one of the most fun series with chess as the subject I’ve seen.
Questions about Beth Harmon vs Borgov
Does Beth beat Borgov? Yes. In the last episode Beth Harmon beats Borgov in Moscow. He offers a draw, she declines, and after her queen sacrifice and pawn promotion Borgov resigns. In the show he stands up, hugs her and says “It’s your game, take it.” The famous image of Borgov handing Beth his king comes from the book: in Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel he lifts his king and holds it out to her instead of tipping it over.
Did Borgov let Beth win? No. Beth turned down his draw offer and played on until he had no choice but to resign. Afterwards he hugs her and tells her “It’s your game, take it.” That’s respect, not a gift.
Who is Borgov in The Queen’s Gambit? Vasily Borgov is the fictional Soviet world chess champion and Beth Harmon’s final boss. Beth loses to him in Mexico City (episode 4) and again in Paris (episode 6) before the final game in Moscow.
Is Borgov a real chess player? No, Borgov is not a real chess player. He’s played by the Polish actor Marcin Dorociński. His chess is real though: the final game is Ivanchuk vs Wolff from the 1993 Biel Interzonal, move for move up to Black’s 36th move, the one Borgov seals at the adjournment. Everything after that was invented for the show, and engines rate those moves as close to perfect.
Is Borgov based on Kasparov? No. Borgov is loosely based on Boris Spassky. Like Spassky, Borgov is a Russian chess prodigy who grows up to become world champion, and Beth’s rivalry with him mirrors Bobby Fischer against Spassky in 1972: a lone American taking on the Soviet chess machine. Chess coach Bruce Pandolfini, one of the show’s consultants, even brought insights from the 1972 Fischer-Spassky broadcasts to it.
Kasparov’s link is behind the scenes. He was offered the part of Borgov, turned it down, and asked to be a consultant instead, together with Pandolfini. He’s the one who picked the final game: he went through about 700 games looking for a Queen’s Gambit that ended in a complicated, adjourned position, and landed on Ivanchuk vs Wolff. Patrick Wolff recognised his own game a couple of days after the show came out.
What opening does Beth Harmon play? She’s a flexible player, but her two favourite openings are the Sicilian Defence, which she plays as Black against 1. e4, and the Queen’s Gambit (1. d4 d5 2. c4), the opening the show is named after. In the final game against Borgov she opens 1. d4 and plays the Queen’s Gambit, which Borgov accepts. Want more games? Here are my own greatest chess games, at a slightly lower level than Beth Harmon’s.
How does The Queen’s Gambit end? After the final game Beth gets out of the car on the way to the airport, walks through Moscow, and sits down to play chess with the old men in the park. That’s the last scene of the show.
Hope you liked this breakdown of the Queen’s Gambit final game, and stay safe.
