Beth Harmon is a fictional character from the series 'The Queen's Gambit'.
She is confident, ambitious and observant.
She is always trying to improve in chess, and is extremely independent and logic driven.
Throughout the series, we can see she is determined to play in the Soviet Union, and removes any
obstacle along the way.
She is blunt and focuses more on the truth than on other people’s feelings.
When people fail to understand her logic, she becomes critical of them.
Introverted Intuition: Ni is subjective, focused and precise, being
used primarily to find a specific personal solution for the user, using all the data
available to it.
Her Ni has her in a laser-like focused trance where she envisions herself to be the grandmaster
of chess.
Her whole outlook of life is literally chess.
Beth likes to focus on completely controllable goals, like chess itself, a completely controllable
64 square universe.
She can predict the future based on her intuition and gets caught up in her abstract and metaphorical ideas.
Here are some examples for her dominant Ni: - She relies on her instincts to form strategies,
which is why she visualized the board.
- She has shown to be extremely capable of planning ahead, like when she decides to start
taking Russian classes, despite the opportunity of playing in Russia being very far away.
- She is constantly focused on the bigger picture of her chess career.
She remarks multiple times in the series that she plans on being the worldwide champion
even before being in the level of the Russians.
- She has a very vivid inner world as showcased by her visualization of the board and in the
3rd episode when she describes the chess board as a world that she can control and predict.
Ni users interpret what they observe into impressions, meaning, or patterns.
She regularly shows Ni traits, and doesn’t operate in the moment like most people might
think at first glance.
Extroverted Thinking: Te users trust a system that can produce physical
and observable results.
That's also why Te users are known for being goal-oriented and results oriented.
Te is the tool that supports her Ni, and she wants to see results to prove the logic.
Beth prefers to be direct with people and never gives up on what she wants.
She practices consistently while attending tournaments.
In episode 7 she mentions consistently practicing 8 hours a day:
She also prides herself on being able to spot discrepancies in her opponents’ strategy
and even in her own.
Her way of thinking is linear and organized.
If something aligns with her vision, she goes for it; if not, she finds a way to work around it.
When confronted with a challenge, she sees it as an opportunity to innovate.
Beth's Te function comes from her being objective, pragmatic, and deductive in her actions.
She always asks people the rules of a game, and she exposes her thoughts to the external world.
She constantly revisits her games with opponents in her mind to continuously improve herself.
She feels safe when playing chess because the rules are well-known and clear, so she
can dominate and knows what to expect.
Introverted Feeling: Introverted feelers focus on how the external
world, people, or situations make them feel personally.
Based on these feelings, they develop their own internal value system of what they have
deemed to be good or bad.
Beth's Fi is her having secret and intense feelings, and doing whatever it takes to achieve
her moral and personal goals.
She's not always thinking about how others are feeling and is not concerned about what
others think of her, but she has a strong sense of right or wrong and always surprises
people with her unique behavior.
Another example is the way she judges her adoptive father:
She refused the Christian church’s money because
she did not trust them, and she’d rather go to great lengths to make money on her own
than be corrupted.
She also appeared to dislike the whole American procedure after her victory, so she ended
up purposefully missing the flight, because playing chess with those old men in the park
meant more to her.
In the end she was happy following her ideals.
Extroverted Sensing: Se users desire to experience life with all
of their senses.
They want to taste, feel, smell, hear, and see new things.
Her inferior function comes from her completely losing control of her life, and leaving everything
for drugs and alcohol.
She wants to dance and go to restaurants, but she always ends up feeling guilty, because
she knows she should be preparing for the next game or simply resting, because that
pays off in the long term.
In the end, under huge stress, all of the pressure and emotional instability surfaces
through the means of Se.
She smokes and drinks until she passes out drunk and abuses the green tranquilizers even more.
A well described Se grip.
This is an objective and impersonal function, as all extraverted functions are, meaning
Se users are not concerned with absorbing and remembering every little painful detail
like Si users are.
Beth has a strong work ethic.
Even since she was a kid, she focused on only one goal: chess.
Though she may have gotten a little lost along the way, she eventually recognized that she
should start playing games for real and not just choosing them for the reward money.
She doesn’t want to learn chess from the inside out, like a Ti user would – she says
she only studies the games she loses retrospectively for her weaknesses.
The point is to figure out what she did wrong and avoid it the next time.
She also shows her sense of good sportsmanship, and she always tries to shake hands after
a match, though her temper can also cause her to storm out.
She can be blunt and straightforward, and this is seen when she simply gets up and leaves
a group if she isn’t interested in its conversation.
But she is private with her feelings.
She sometimes even underestimates her feelings.
Consider the time when she makes it through a funeral without crying but then bursts into
tears in the car after seeing a photo of herself and the deceased.
As a child, Beth had an intuitive knowledge of a very cerebral game, and quickly figured
out components of it without even being told what they were.
She flickers between acting in the moment and long-term planning.
On the one hand, she’ll criticize herself for “not seeing” what someone else’s
end-game is since she is too focused on her own narrow intentions.
On the other hand, she also thinks far ahead in her life.
She chose to take Russian classes as a child so she could speak the language of her eventual
“World Championship” opponents . She is not without flaws.
A major one is that she assumes she knows a lot, so she does not study as much as she
should, nor does she pay attention to the details of her opponents’ previous games
in order to learn their tricks.
This is a typical case of Ni’s ability to read between the lines, but then assume that’s
all the studying they need to do to master it, which leads to flaws in their understanding.
Another flaw is that she has an impulsive inferior Se, prone to over-indulgence of drugs
and alcohol.
She was able to purchase her family home on a whim and then blow most of her bank account
on it, realizing only later that she doesn’t have enough money to cover her expenses of
going to Russia.
Rather than studying the night before an important match, she foolishly decides to get drunk
and mess around with guys at the bar downstairs after a friend invites her.
She's an intuitive player – she doesn't study per se, or memorize every single step,
but rather, she focuses on predicting how her rival will counter-attack.
Combining her Te and Ni, she follows a single way of playing, based on what she does believe
is the most efficient and useful way.
She's strict when it comes to chess.
She starts to drink alcohol and take pills in order to gain a complete state of mind
– but we can clearly see that it's not because she's seeking new experiences as a high Se
user would do, but rather, because she believes that she needs to do so in order to play correctly.
Under extreme stress, she over-indulges on desires and impulses.
She demonstrates very impressive Ni-Te usage starting from the first episode, demonstrated
by her clear vision and obsession.Without a doubt, Beth is a great INTJ character.
One of the most, if not the most INTJ-like fictional female characters that viewers can
witness through a TV show.