Before The Queen's Gambit there was Vera Menchik, who was one of the best players in the world
in the early 20th century and paved the way for women's chess.
She lived a fascinating life from almost the day she was born, so let’s take a look at
the incredible story of Vera Menchik.
Vera Menchik was born in Moscow in 1906.
Early in the 20th century Russia was still an empire, and her family was relatively comfortable.
Her family owned a prosperous mill and lived in a large apartment in Moscow, and Menchik
and her sister both attended a private school.
Then, when Menchik was 11 years old in 1917, the October Revolution toppled Tsar Nicholas
II.
The sudden collapse of not just the government but of every single element of the state transformed
Russia into pure chaos.
Menchik and her family witnessed the rapid unraveling of society as different governments
formed and fell, and different political and military factions squared off in a civil war
that lasted more than five years.
And Menchik's home wasn't insulated from the chaos.
There were hurried trials and mass executions, and often citizens had no idea who was actually
in charge on a given day.
Vera Menchik was introduced to chess by her father.
He gave her a chess set as a present when she was nine years old and taught her the
fundamentals of the game.
Menchik took to it immediately.
A few years later she took second place at her school's chess tournament.
Although her mother was English, and she'd visited England as a young girl, Menchik only
spoke Russian.
After the Russian Revolution and the chaos of the civil war drove the family to flee,
Menchik settled in the town of Hastings, England with her mother and sister.
She didn't speak the language which made adjusting to her new home extremely difficult.
The young woman found the "quiet" aspect of chess alluring.
She said,
"Chess is a quiet game and therefore the best hobby for a person who cannot speak the language
properly."
Menchik mustered up the courage to join the Hastings Chess Club in 1923.
Since she already knew the game well, she didn't need to speak English to study.
She began taking private lessons from John Drewitt and eventually began studying with
grandmaster Géza Maróczy.
Encouraged by Maróczy, Menchik played in the Hastings Chess Championship in 1924 and
managed a draw against the English women's chess champion, Edith Price.
Just like Beth Harmon in The Queen's Gambit, Vera Menchik became a force to be reckoned
with in chess at a very young age.
Learning from her chess mentor, Maróczy, he stressed to her to focus on defensive and
positional play.
Menchik's own style favored positional brilliance and the sometimes incredible ability to pounce
on any mistake her opponent made.
Under Maróczy's tutelage, Menchik soon found her footing and became a very strong player.
After playing in a few local tournaments in Hastings, she was ready for a bigger platform,
and in 1927 at the age of 21 she found it: The Women's World Chess Championship.
Menchik was already regarded as one of the strongest female players in the world, and
she proved it by winning the first-ever Women's Championship.
Then she proved it wasn't a fluke by holding that title for the next 17 years.
Over the course of those years, Menchik faced several robust challenges to her status as
the best female player in the world, but triumphed over all of them.
Vera Menchik wasn't the first woman to play chess, or even the first woman to play chess
at a very high level.
But Menchik was a trailblazer for women in the game because she was one of the first
to regularly beat her male opponents, even grandmaster-level players.
After winning the Women's World Championship in 1927, Menchik concentrated on breaking
into mainstream chess tournaments.
That of course meant male-dominated competitions.
She quickly established that she was more than capable, and in 1929 she was invited
to play a tournament in Ramsgate.
She played brilliantly, tying with the legendary Akiba Rubinstein for second place and finishing
just half a point behind Jose Raul Capablanca, who is regarded as one of the greatest chess
players to ever live.
This success earned Menchik an invitation to participate in the fourth international
master chess tournament in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia, in 1929.
She was the only woman to be invited.
While she only scored three points in 21 games, the reigning world champion, Alexander Alekhine,
praised her performance.
He even noted that with more experience she would be a "high-classed international champion."
Unfortunately, chauvinism and sexism were something Vera, like all female players, had
to deal with on a regular basis.
"Are you sure you want to do this?"
"I'm sure."
"We don't have a women's section.
… I'll put you in beginners."
During the 1929 Karlsbad tournament, a player named Albert Becker scorned her as an opponent
and suggested that the "Vera Menchik Club" be formed.
Membership would be limited to anyone she actually defeated.
Becker soon became the first member of that club, and it quickly became a badge of honor,
with each new member declared president.
When people talk about being a "master" or "grandmaster" chess player, they aren't being
complimentary.
They are official rankings.
Chess players are rated based on their performance against other players, and the title of grandmaster
is awarded by the World Chess Federation to a player with an official rating of 2500 or
higher.
There are about 800 million ranked chess players in the world, and only about 1,500 of them
are grandmasters.
Which means Vera Menchik would have been considered a grandmaster.
Her rating in 1929 was 2535, when she was ranked as the 52nd best player in the world.
That would have qualified her for the title…if it had existed.
Unfortunately, the title of grandmaster wasn’t created until 1950.
While it’s often informally granted to obviously dominant players retroactively, Menchik missed
out on her chance for official recognition.
Chess doesn't have the glamour of baseball or rock and roll, but it does have a Hall
of Fame.
Established in 1986, the hall moved to St. Louis in 2011 and continues to be a major
tourist attraction.
The Chess Hall of Fame maintains two lists of inductees, one for the United States and
one for the world.
The World Hall of Fame currently has 37 inductees, including legends like Akiba Rubinstein, Richard
Réti, Garry Kasparov, and Vera Menchik.
As part of the hall's grand opening celebrations in 2011, Menchik became the 16th person inducted
into the Hall of Fame, and the first woman.
She's one of 13 women out of the 100 chess masters currently included across both lists,
demonstrating her importance to the game and to the history of women proving their intellectual
equality to men.
By 1944, Vera Menchik had lived quite the life.
Born in imperial Russia, she'd experienced the Bolshevik Revolution firsthand, watched
her family lose everything, moved to a foreign country where she didn't speak the language,
and then established herself as the best female chess player in the world.
Seemingly destined to live a life of excitement, Menchik was living in London with her sister
Olga and her mother when World War II broke out.
London had been savagely bombed by the Nazis in the early days of the war, a time referred
to as The Blitz.
As the war ground on, the bombings ceased, until 1944, when Germany launched a second
blitz called Operation Steinbock.
Sadly, one of these bombing raids in London claimed Vera Menchik's life.
The chess champion had been participating in a tournament in London.
On June 26, 1944, a German bomb hit her house, killing her and her family instantly.
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