I never thought I was a chess person. Then Covid came, and I've found chess cathartic | Nancy Jo Sales

Netflix's The Queen's Gambit has thousands of people interested in chess. The game is a great personal comfort for me

Back in April, months before Netflix's series The Queen's Gambit caused a sensation and a run on chess sets, I started playing chess with an app on my phone. This was a strange thing for me to do, since I had never thought of myself as someone who would ever be good at chess. Every time I'd ever played anyone, I'd lost almost immediately, coming away feeling frustrated and dumb. I guess I liked to think it was because I'm more of an intuitive, right-brained person, not a plotter or a planner. And so I avoided chess for most of my life. But something about April, with Covid-19 raging and New York City on lockdown, sent me into the battlefield.

I'd never really realized before that it is a battlefield. Playing chess is like being thrust into an episode of Game of Thrones. As I lay in bed at night, unable to sleep, anxious and fearful about the plague that was whipping through the city, taking the lives of thousands and then tens of thousands, I was advancing across the field like a wildling wielding its spear. Sometimes, in my imagination, I was Boudicca, the legendary, first-century redheaded Celtic queen who waged war against the Roman invaders. I loved hearing the thunk of the app when my piece would land, taking out an adversary. Chess is combat. And it's exhilarating.