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Is anyone surprised? IQ tests are not designed to measure things that make you a good chess player. Then again IQ tests are just one way to define intelligence

Also from that article,



So they couldn't find a correlation between IQ and chess ability, but they did find a correlation between the amount of practice and chess ability.

Also might be worth mentioning that deliberate practice modifies your brain.

Practice makes perfect - up to your genetic limits.

Only a few people can make it to International Master level, let alone Grandmaster level in chess. No matter how much they practice.......

That's an interesting hypothesis.

No, it's not a hypothesis - it's fact.

Look at the world of.....almost anything, from high-altitude mountaineering, rock-climbing, sprinting, marathon running - to mathematics, physics, chemistry - to, yes, piano playing and chess.
BTW, I've done (and still am doing) all the above, so I have personal experience - and know what I'm talking about.

Or to put it another way, we aren't born equal.

Otherwise, anyone can be whatever they choose to be, whether a virtuoso concert pianist, a sub-2hr 3min marathoner, a chess GM.......just as long as they put the effort in. And we all know that isn't true.

Why do you think this? Is this another hypothesis?

Let me reply with a question: do you think you can become an IM, if you work at chess hard enough?

Actually, yes. I know (of) a couple IMs, they're not even people I would consider smart. However they did play chess since some ludicrously young age and get tutored. I will concede that I probably can't reach GM level though, there are enough people who take chess seriously that among them there are enough with natural advantages over me to fill up the GM ranks.

One of them is a family friend of a family friend, he was rated 1700 and I had played him when I was 9 or something. That's obviously very good, but he had private coaching and all that since age 3 or something. However several years later in high school I was able to beat 1700 rated players occasionally after just a few months intense practice.

The family friend was rated 2100 or 2200+ at their peak and I don't consider that person super smart either. They started chess lessons a bit later than the IM kid.

Most of the very strong chess players I know of (I'll put the cutoff at 1900) are probably not even that far above average at many common intellectual "yardstick" activities (e.g. math, science, writing). One of the guys I know who was about 2000 showed me his college essay and it was an incoherent mess, and he was also pretty mediocre at science even though he wanted to do engineering and spent a bunch of time on it. If you want to dig deeper and identify specific things like working memory, I doubt they would be much better than average there too. I think a lot of people don't consider being good at chess very impressive, and I think there's a reason why.

More generally though, the human brain has incredible capacity. Consider the fact that a significant number of people are capable of expressing themselves using language well. To spontaneously put thoughts into coherent sentences is an incredibly complex task. If the average person can do that, they sure as heck can memorize hundreds of thousands of chess plays or pages of music and make sense of them. The reason why you see a large difference in ability is because the brain is inefficient at learning and therefore it takes a tremendous amount of time to develop a skill to a high level.

To drive the point home further because you're probably going to come up with something to say back and because I don't feel like doing something productive right now, I think that playing the piano is a lot harder than thinking about say, moduli stacks or some other math that's hard. With piano, when I play music I have to group things into patterns and then train muscle memory to do those things automatically. In fact my sight reading skills are so horrible that my friends who don't even practice piano can sight read pop songs much better than I can, and I'm supposed to be the one whose brain is special because I think about complicated abstract things all the time or something. The amount of conscious control I have when playing piano is close to zero, and to me that says it is hard.

No, you don't need to be 'smart' to be an excellent chess player - if you mean 'smart' as having high IQ.

Your brain just needs to be 'wired' in a specific manner .

"Smart" is such a generalization. Someone can be very brilliant in certain areas while being myopic in others.

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have the capacity to focus their mental faculties on very narrow spectrums, such that they became brilliant at that particular aspect, be it art, or memory of number sequences, or shape recognition. Or even a particular aspect of music.

For instance, autistic people consistently better 'normal' people in tests involving finding a particular design that is hidden in a myriad of other shapes, because their brains are able to 'zoom in' to the exclusion of any other distractions to seek what they look for, in a way that non-autistic people can't manage.

But their 'smartness' is one-dimensional. And of course, ASD is a genetic condition.

Yes, I have met some autistic savants before, but not all good chess players are autistic.

I don't know that all great chess players just have brains "wired" correctly. Noam Elkies is a grandmaster but he sure as heck does a lot of other things, which might require different "wiring".

They say women's brains differ from men's brains considerably by biology, but women still drive cars, fly planes, write books, and do science and math at the highest levels. Even in male dominated fields I don't think that high profile women are there because genetics made their brains different.

Maybe the exposure to pattern recognition as an infant matters a lot in development, maybe language matters, we'll probably never know because the brain is so complicated, but for that very reason it's also a fallacy to assume it's all genetics.

Not all examples are that extreme.

That's so true...I find myself a good example...I have always been considered smart by everyone (including IQ tests), but I am a complete idiot when it comes to certain little things

I was never any good in chess because I could not maintain things in my short term or working memory (and I started playing from very early age with my father). I knew what I should do, just could not.

Sigh...Of course it's not ALL genetics, as I think we have established several times in this thread.

Obviously genetics plays a huge role is what each of us
ends up being excellent in.

But I will quote Lang Lang, who stated something to the
effect that although some people have more natural (piano) technique,
that you cannot assume you can get the same results with
less work!

Also, people tend to stick with and practice more when they are
good at something, because if they have early success, it's enjoyable
for them. So usually, the top musicians have BOTH natural talent AND have worked the hardest to achieve their abilities.

Same with the Chess world and all other fields. Bobby Fischer was a child prodigy, winning the U.S. Championship at the age of 14, and went on to win the World Chess Championship at the age of 29. He also probably studied the game of chess more than anyone else at the time.

Double sigh - in every thread related to music and genetics, this comes up as if it is some weird inevitable strawman. Nobody, AFAIK, has ever said that in this forum, and yet, it keeps coming back over and over as if somebody has said it.

What's with that, anyway? It's not like it concerns some incredibly subtle nuance that is hard to grasp. It's just a simple fact - nobody is arguing that position, and no one ever has. Why is that so difficult?

And not only that, they are tautological, i.e., they measure intelligence because that's what they are supposedly measuring.

Sez who? I don't think there is any agreed-upon definition of "intelligence" in science.

Do you want me to look at some of your games and give you advice on how to get there?

Your advice is always welcome, from how to play Rach 3 to how to become a GM :

This is my latest game: (me - Mr.Patzer)
1 e4 e5 2 Bc4 Be7 3 Qf3 Nc6 4 Qxf7#