A guide to understanding chess in the final episode.

They’re always real moves and it’s always very accurate. You can freeze-frame anything, and it’s a real chess setup. There’s even a whole sequence where you never see the board, but they’re still actually moving the pieces where they’re supposed to. ― Writer/Director Scott Frank

Given the accuracy of the chess setups in “The Queen’s Gambit”, we can use our background knowledge of the characters and data from chess engines to gain a deeper appreciation of what happened in the final scenes of the show.

Notation

Prior to the 1980s, chess literature…