The Queen’s Gambit: Why Beth Kept Walking Away During Her Match With Georgi

Beth Harmon takes an unusual approach in her chess match with Georgi Girev in The Queen’s Gambit, constantly walking away from the table and only returning to rapidly movie a piece, so what was the reason behind her surprising tactic? With the pair meeting each other at a tournament in Mexico, Georgi is a child prodigy who also represents Beth’s first taste of playing a Russian, something that will only get more difficult as the series progresses. Despite the fact that he’s only 13-years-old, Georgi proves a considerable match for Beth.

The initial period of play between the pair lasts for five hours in The Queen’s Gambit episode 4, “Middle Game.” Despite Beth being the favorite, she’s consistently frustrated by her opponent, leading to an adjournment and Beth having to seal her move. When play resumes the next day, Beth appears to be in a rush to get things over with. She leaves the table, and then quickly makes her move before walking away again, sometimes standing and looking disinterested, other times loudly tapping her foot. The tactic work as she eventually defeats Georgi, but it’s a confusing approach that she doesn’t use again afterwards.

Given the difficulty of the match, then it’s possible that Beth needed to change tactics in order to defeat Georgi. Throughout her entire career up to this point in The Queen’s Gambit, Beth had only played older, more experienced chessmen. She was the one that everyone overlooked and took lightly, and then the child prodigy, so has always had to fight uphill battles. The situation was reversed here: while Georgi himself had been playing chess since a very young age, he’s a lot younger than Beth, and she was seemingly thrown by that, and perhaps underestimated him. When they came back from the adjournment, then she needed to do something different, distracting him to the point where he was visibly confused and uncertain of what to do, and leading to her getting the win.

This would make sense, because Beth learns from her opponents as she goes along in The Queen’s Gambit, and tends not to make the same mistake twice. When she played Harry Beltik, he arrived late and then was constantly yawning and slurping coffee, which knocked Beth off her game to the point she had to go to the bathroom, only returning (and winning) after taking her pills. While Georgi was a talented player who was driven to be the best in the world, he also tipped his hand to distractions by talking about his desire to see a drive-in movie. That suggested he might be susceptible, and it’s also worth noting that he mentions Elizabeth Taylor specifically. As pointed out by Insider, this marks the first time Beth wears yellow in The Queen’s Gambit, mirroring a famous dress worn by Taylor at the 1961 Oscars, which further ties into this idea. Beth is an instinctive player, but this also shows she knows how to get into an opponent’s head.

However, The Queen’s Gambit novel shows a different side of this. In the book, Beth figures out the entire game in her head the night before, and wants to “crush” Georgi because she feels a deep hatred for him. Preceding that, though, it also discusses how she was behind on the clock, and so it’s clear that she needs to speed the play up to get her movies in, but also because of her loathing of her opponent. There’s little sign in the show that she feels such a passionate dislike of Georgi, though it is possible her anger at not beating him reflects onto him. In both the show and the book, though, Beth softens after defeating him, seeing some of herself reflected in him, which is why she tells him she’s the best she’s played. She realizes that he has nothing else but chess when he doesn’t understand her questioning, and in that also sees that Alma was right: there’s more to life than chess.

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