25 Nov '20 23:31>
Like most of you, I've seen my share of TV shows and movies with chess players and/or tournaments. The majority of these showcase chess players as eccentric, socially isolated, oddballs, with psychological "issues" My first experience of this as a kid was an watching an early James Bond film - From Russia with Love, the tournament winner was an unsmiling guy with overly large eyes who was secretly a member of the criminal organization "Spectre" Many more examples followed through the years, right up to last month when Beth Harmon of The Queen's Gambit burst on the Netflix scene, complete with her own psychological "baggage" While it's true that Fischer, Morphy and a few others had some real mental health problems, the vast majority of chess players are not this way. So - why the stigma? Does Hollywood and the publishing world think portraying chess players this way adds to their mystique? Does it make things more entertaining? Do these folks know they are perpetuating a falsehood?