‘I think chess is sexy’: How a teen’s gambit led to love
Beset by the blues during COVID, a girl finds romance through online chess – and inspires a TV show.
By Jane Wheatley
Jasmine Paton was a teenager when she met her partner Anthony Arena playing online chess. Arena thought he was playing a middle-aged man.Credit: John Davis
In the northern spring of 2020, 16-year-old Jasmine Paton shut herself in her bedroom and stayed there for more than two years. “It started in the first COVID lockdown,” she explains on a call from her family home in north-west London. “I couldn’t see my friends or my dad or do my GCSE [year 11] exams. I got really, really depressed.” Her mother organised help – a psychiatrist, medication, weekly phone calls with the family GP – but Paton refused to leave her room and was self-harming. “People kept advising me to take up a hobby,” she recalls, “I knew how to play chess, so eventually I started playing online. And I remembered: I love chess! I had bad insomnia so I would play literally for 10 hours straight through the night.”
She gave herself a male name, uploaded a profile picture of her cat and one day randomly chose to challenge a player with the tag name ChessGoon. “We started playing and I really loved his style, but I did not like that he beat me – I had a stronger rating than him.”
After some time, they began messaging, commenting on the games: “He had a more aggressive style, it’s called ‘Romantic’; I’m quite a boring player actually, I like to weasel a slight advantage, get to the end game and win from there. He would go for the most insane ‘check me in one’ tactics. I mean, I’d obviously see it and I’m like, ‘I’m not going to fall for that.’ ”
So you were both fascinated and annoyed by each other? “Yes, we were quite rude, making chippy little comments. Then one day I wrote: ‘Can’t believe you just lost to a teenage girl.’ (By this time, Paton was 18.) He goes, ‘What?! I thought you were a middle-aged old man; you play like one.’ ” Intrigued, Paton searched ChessGoon on Instagram: “Oh my god, he was young and attractive; I hadn’t really thought of him as a person.”
Her opponent was Anthony Arena, a 24-year-old data analyst from New York. When I call him, he is keen to talk. “This is my favourite story to tell,” he says. “It’s changed my life. When we played I won at first, then she was winning and we got into the banter: I thought, ‘This guy is funny, I could really be friends with him.’ Then one day I got this message: ‘You’re getting your butt kicked by an 18-year-old girl.’ I had no idea! We started video chatting and it became romantic. I had to meet her and I booked a flight to England.”
Anthony Arena was a data analyst in New York when he started playing online chess with Paton, which led to romance. “It’s changed my life,” he says.Credit: John Davis
It was August 2023. Paton left the refuge of her bedroom and went to pick Arena up at London’s Heathrow Airport. How was it, I ask her, meeting in real life? “I don’t want to be all romantic and corny,” she says doubtfully. Go ahead, I say. “Well, I just ran up and hugged him. From that moment, we have been best friends; we love each other so much.”
Since then, the two have been back and forth between London and New York, and Arena, now 27, is in the UK for Paton’s 21st birthday. We meet at her home in a street of large Edwardian houses overlooking London’s Queen’s Park. Paton has three siblings and three step-siblings; two of them are snacking in the big sunny kitchen and greet me warmly. “I love Jas’s family,” enthuses Arena, “they always make me so welcome. I play chess with her dad.”
Today they’re going to a favourite haunt, the Chess and Bridge Store in Baker Street, and I’m tagging along. We stroll through the park, shaded by big horse chestnut and plane trees in full summer greenery. It’s mid-June and hot; they are both in shorts. Arena has an athletic figure and is a good 20 centimetres taller than Paton.
They link hands all the way – through the park, crossing streets and on the underground. At an escalator, we find ourselves briefly separated in single file. “Why are you so far from me?” frowns Paton. He smiles and reaches for her hand. On the pavement outside the Chess Store, there are tables set up with boards: “If you’re on your own and sit down at one,” says Paton, “very soon someone will challenge you to a game. There are loads like this in New York, which I love.”
Paton and Arena at their favourite haunt, the London Chess Store.Credit: John Davis
But today the tables are in full sun and we retreat indoors to sit at a chess board in the relative cool. They are greeted by a staff member and the three exchange chess gossip. Paton says that a member of the English chess team was at her home for dinner the night before; Arena glances at her: “Am I allowed to say?” he asks. “I beat him.” She laughs, “He was probably distracted by me and my mum chewing his ear.”
While the other two continue gossiping, I notice Arena is silently moving pieces around the board. He sees me watching: “Oh, I’m rehearsing that game; I do this a lot.” He returns to the board: “Ah yes, here and here,” he mutters, “sack the bishop … then I think I castled.” Paton says they used to analyse chess games from opposite sides of the Atlantic: “We’d choose a famous game; he’d take his board to a cafe, I’d take mine to the park and we’d play through the moves.”
“To begin with, everything was so new, we were both in love with chess and falling in love with each other.”
Anthony Arena
“To begin with,” says Arena, “everything was so new, we were both in love with chess and falling in love with each other.” Paton nods and adds: “But it wasn’t yet expressed; they were intense games, quite flirty, as you can imagine. I think chess is sexy: you have to be really sharp and creative; it has all those tropes you look for in a person. We’d be on FaceTime and I’d look at him, so passionate and concentrated.” Later they would go on virtual dates: “I’d take her to Wagamama,” says Arena, “her dinner, my lunch, we’d both have sushi.”
“Shall we play a game?” he suggests. They face each other: “She likes to set up her knights like this,” he says. “Now there’s a couple of ways I can go … I used to have this opening, it did well against different people then Jas just decimated it.” Paton shrugs: “It’s so obvious and predictable,” she mocks.
They are both highly rated players, used to winning. In the depths of her depression, Paton had found a safe place playing fiercely competitive games online with the unknown American. “I’ve watched her grow,” says Arena, “building herself from rock bottom, coming off her meds, getting to university.” Paton is doing a psychology degree, has a side hustle tutoring young chess players, and has mended relationships lost during her depression. But she still recalls the darkest of times. “I want to say that chess saved me,” she confesses, “but really it was my mum. The depression had taken away my voice; I couldn’t speak to anyone because I didn’t have anything good to say. Seeing the pain in my mum’s eyes, it just killed me. I’d been reading about the culture and history of chess so I would tell her about that, then we could talk about something apart from how I was feeling.”
Paton and Arena divide their time between London and New York.
Her mother, Camilla Lewis, runs a TV production company and those conversations produced a light-bulb moment for her. “Through Jasmine, I discovered the chess community was huge – six million people playing regularly in the UK alone,” Lewis recalls. “I woke up one night and thought, ‘Hang on, there’s no chess on television. Why not?’ ” Lewis’s company, Curve Media, went on to produce a show for the BBC pitting 12 rising chess stars – six women and six men – against each other. There were competitors’ backstories, jeopardy and excitable commentary but Chess Masters: The Endgame was not telegenic like Bake Off or MasterChef. The Guardian’s reviewer called it “so dull it’s almost unwatchable”.
Even so, it did well enough for the BBC to consider a second series and, according to Lewis, it is now headed for Australian screens. “There are two broadcasters bidding for the rights,” she tells me when I call her. “It’s very exciting.”
The NSW Chess Association’s Rupert Coy is hopeful the show will raise the game’s profile, particularly if it encourages more women to play. “According to ChatGPT, only eight per cent of Australian chess players are female,” he says. “There are some very talented players among them – the NSW Blitz Championship in November last year was won by a schoolgirl – but we would like to see more coming through.” Online chess took off during COVID, while the film The Queen’s Gambit was expected to entice more women to take up the game. But after an initial flurry of interest, the numbers remain stubbornly low.
Several female players told Good Weekend that young girls take up the game in primary school but drop away in their teen years. NSW top player Kris Quek says the gender gap discourages them: “There are so few other [chess-playing] girls to be friendly with and friendship is really important, particularly in secondary school.”
Junior chess champion Athena-Malar Retnaraja agrees: “Girls give up chess to play a different sport to be with other girls,” she says. “My older brother plays and we go to the same competitions; I would definitely feel more lonely without him.”
Adelaide writer and academic Katerina Bryant says the chess landscape is so male-dominated that as a player, she frequently felt as if she were the sole representative of her gender. “And you could feel the hostility in some places. I play mostly online now because of that; even so, there is online abuse of women players despite moderating.” I tell her the story of Jasmine Paton and Anthony Arena falling in love over chess. Isn’t there something potentially rather sensual about the intimacy of the game – the frisson of locking eyes with your opponent as you consider the next move? Bryant laughs – her partner is also a chess player. “Oh, I’m not looking at him, I’m staring at the board and thinking how I can crush him.”
Back in London, the two young lovers agree to call their game a draw and we go next door for a cup of tea. I ask if they think of moving countries to be together. They do, of course, but where? “It would be hard to leave my chaotic family,” admits Paton, “and I’m young, still studying.” Arena agrees it’s difficult: “With my family and stuff, I’m the eldest, I’d have things to sort out.” His face clears: “But I’m here now, Jas will be in New York in July, and we’re committed to making it the best summer ever.”
“It always is,” says Paton happily.
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