11/30/2025
In October 2020, Netflix released The Queen's Gambit.
The series captivated 62 million households in its first month. Chess sets sold out worldwide. Young girls picked up the game in record numbers.
It was a cultural phenomenon.
But in Tbilisi, Georgia, a 79-year-old woman watched the finale and felt something shatter inside her.
Her name appeared on screen. Her life's work was mentioned. And then came the lie.
"There's Nona Gaprindashvili, but she's the female world champion and has never faced men."
Never faced men.
The words hung in the air like an insult wrapped in fiction.
This is the true story of Nona Gaprindashvili—and why those seven words sparked a legal battle that shook Hollywood.
Nona was born in 1941 in Zugdidi, a small town in Soviet Georgia. She was the only girl among six children. Her five older brothers introduced her to chess at age five.
They made her play goalkeeper in their football games because she was a girl.
At the chessboard, they learned their mistake.
By age eleven, she was beating them all. When her brother couldn't attend a tournament, the team invited Nona to take his place. On the train to Tbilisi, she defeated the team's first board.
She was twelve years old.
A coach named Vakhtang Karseladze spotted her talent. Her parents sent her to live with an aunt in the capital so she could train with grandmasters.
At fourteen, she reached the semi-finals of the Soviet Women's Championship.
At twenty, she won the Women's Candidates Tournament.
At twenty-one, she crushed the reigning world champion Elisaveta Bykova by a devastating 9-2 score.
She was now the Women's World Chess Champion.
But Nona wanted more than a women's title.
She wanted to prove something no woman had proven before: that she could compete with the best male players in the world.
So she entered men's tournaments.
In 1963, she won the Hastings Challengers tournament. She faced Estonian legend Paul Keres. She played against Serbian grandmaster Svetozar Gligorić. She battled Latvian world champion Mikhail Tal.
By 1968—the year Netflix claimed she had "never faced men"—Nona had competed against at least 59 male players, including ten grandmasters.
She didn't just face them.
She defeated many of them.
For sixteen consecutive years, Nona held the Women's World Championship. She defended her title four times—three against Alla Kushnir, once against fellow Georgian Nana Alexandria.
Then came 1977.
At the Lone Pine International Tournament in California, Nona didn't enter the women's section. She entered the open competition against a field including grandmasters Oscar Panno, Pal Benko, Walter Browne, and Samuel Reshevsky.
She didn't just compete.
She tied for first place.
She won six games—more than any other player. In the final round, she defeated International Master John Peters to clinch her share of the title.
No woman had ever won an elite open tournament.
Until Nona.
The following year, FIDE made history. At their 1978 Congress, they awarded Nona Gaprindashvili the title of Grandmaster—not Woman Grandmaster, but the same title held by Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, and every male chess legend.
She was the first woman ever to receive it.
She had finally proved what she set out to prove at age five, beating her brothers at the kitchen table: that a woman could play at the highest level of chess.
Then came The Queen's Gambit.
The show was supposed to celebrate female achievement in chess. Its fictional heroine, Beth Harmon, breaks barriers by competing against men.
But in building up their fictional champion, the show's creators tore down the real one.
The original 1983 novel by Walter Tevis had acknowledged Nona's accomplishments: "There was Nona Gaprindashvili... a player who had met all these Russian Grandmasters many times before."
The Netflix adaptation changed the line entirely: "has never faced men."
A complete reversal of documented history.
Nona contacted Netflix after the series aired. She demanded a correction, an acknowledgment of the truth, a retraction.
Netflix dismissed her concerns.
So at eighty years old, Nona Gaprindashvili filed a $5 million defamation lawsuit.
Netflix argued that The Queen's Gambit was fiction—that creators had artistic license to say whatever they wanted about real people.
A federal judge disagreed.
U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips ruled that Netflix had acted with "reckless disregard" for historical accuracy. She noted that the show referenced Gaprindashvili by name, showed an actor representing her, and presented the false statement as fact within a narrative that otherwise included real events and real people.
"The fact that the Series was a fictional work does not insulate Netflix from liability for defamation," the judge wrote.
In September 2022, Netflix settled.
The terms were not disclosed. There was no publicized apology. But for Nona, the settlement meant something more valuable than money.
It meant the truth was on record.
Today, Nona Gaprindashvili is eighty-four years old.
She still plays competitive chess.
In 2022, at age eighty-one, she won her eighth Women's World Senior Championship. She has won the title more than any other player.
In her home country, the main chess palace in Tbilisi bears her name. FIDE created the Nona Gaprindashvili Cup in her honor—uniquely awarded to the country with the best combined performance across men's and women's chess. She was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame in 2013 and received Georgia's Presidential Order of Excellence in 2015.
Her success inspired a generation. Parents named their daughters Nona. Georgian women dominated international chess for decades, winning Women's World Championships and Olympic gold medals.
She was never forgotten.
She simply refused to be misremembered.
The next time you watch The Queen's Gambit, remember this:
Beth Harmon is fiction.
Nona Gaprindashvili is not.
She didn't just imagine breaking barriers. She shattered them—at twenty-one when she became world champion, at thirty-seven when she became the first female grandmaster, at eighty when she sued a billion-dollar corporation for lying about her legacy.
Some people play chess.
Nona Gaprindashvili changed what the game meant for half the world's population.
And at eighty-four, she's still making her moves.
