Forget The Queen's Gambit, meet this real chess grandmaster

COVID had landed in a big way, we were all scrambling for toilet paper and, in October, everybody was obsessing over a little Netflix drama called The Queen's Gambit.

All of a sudden chess was everywhere, lockdowns were spent with knights and kings, boards were selling out across the globe.

Now imagine if the story that sparked all that excitement was real?

With Netflix documentary Queen of Chess, you get mighty close.

There's no substance abuse, orphanages, cowboy hat-wearing buddies or imagined chess boards on ceilings, but there is one hell of a talented chess player who takes the world by storm and upsets the close-minded elite of the time.

The film tells the story of Hungarian chess prodigy Judit Polgar, who is far more impressive than the fictional Elizabeth Harmon because she's as real as they come.

Judit is the youngest of three daughters born to Laszlo and Klara, behind Susan and Sofia. Laszlo was determined that his children would become geniuses, and researched the greatest minds in history to find out what set them apart.

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Learning that they had all shown their affinity for their fields at a young age and dedicated hours daily to perfecting their craft, he decided he wouldn't leave it to chance with his kids, and set about turning his daughters into chess whizzes.

He settled on chess as it was a cheap option, and was highly popular in the Soviet Union at the time, the 1970s. Each daughter was introduced to the game by about five years old, and regular schooling was eschewed in favour of intense chess training.

While all three Polgar girls were good, it was Judit who stood out the most, and soon she was taking the world by storm.

But before world domination could occur, the Polgars had to get past the oppressive political regime in their home country.

At the time female chess players were seen as inferior - archive footage of American star chess player Bobby Fischer is played in the film, and he does not hold back on disparaging the talents and brains of women, a view that was seemingly held across the (chess) board - and the Hungarian government didn't want to allow the Polgars to compete internationally. They went so far as to have police visit their home several times to threaten the family into submission.

But eventually news started to get out about Judit's incredible talents and as a young teen she started to enter mixed competitions.

Growing up, the Polgars had always admired Garry Kasparov, the biggest name in chess of the era. It was Judit's desire to beat the world number one grandmaster, and she faced him several times throughout her career.

Kasparov is interviewed for the film, and still comes across as arrogant and unwilling to concede just how good Judit was from such a young age.

Despite the routine discrimination and disrespect shown to Judit and her sisters at tournaments, all three seem positive about their experiences with chess, though how they view their father's "experiment" of raising them to be chess geniuses is a little more up in the air.

The documentary is directed by Rory Kennedy - yep, of the famous Kennedys - whose previous work includes Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, Ethel (about her mother), The Synanon Fix and more.

There's plenty of archive footage and photographs, and the recollections of Judit and Kasparov's matches are filled with tension and excitement, not too dissimilar to The Queen's Gambit in that respect.

But Queen of Chess does use that modern documentary trend of holding the shot on someone after they've said something to make it seem more loaded than it really is. It's a bit manipulative, but you can't deny that it is an engaging technique.

As far as the style of documentary storytelling, it's pretty standard. But Judit Polgar's story is so remarkable that it speaks for itself.

For a fun side challenge, try and spot a young Stephen Fry in one of the pieces of archive footage from the late 1980s.