Sure, playing chess needs intelligence, dedication, and good chess players are smarter than an average person. But it’s waaaay exaggerated in movies. I’m a math researcher, and in any movie, my department will be full of chess geniuses. But in reality, only about 10% of them even play chess.
Being skilled at a game has little bearing on your intelligence beyond maybe “above average”. Intelligence is often best reflected in learning speed.
Paul Morphy, chess genius and sometimes described as best in the world in the mid-1800s:
“The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.”
Why play chess with Moriarty when you can just bash him in the head with a chessboard?
I know someone who is pretty good at chess but also thinks vaccines are fake, Musk is a genius, and Ukraine belongs to Russia.
So not all chess players are smart.
Do you know their rating? Tbh most people’s idea of being “pretty good at chess” is actually not very good at all (I don’t mean that as an insult, more lack of familiarity with the game).
That’s not to say that it’s impossible for someone to think those things and be a strong chess player, but it’s probably not super common. I’ve actually ran into a couple people at a local chess club with “interesting” ideas about vaccines and uh… let’s just say they were not hard to beat (I think I mated one guy in like 12 moves). And btw, I’m not even a super strong chess player myself (~1134 USCF). But like, they probably would seem really strong to someone that just occasionally plays chess at family gatherings or whatnot. Chess is a game with a low skill floor and very high skill ceiling, so you have a huge range in ability.
2000 ish, apparently.
I don’t think a minority of rightwingers are dumb. I think they’re invested in their idea of their team, and any insult to their team is an insult to them. They root for Trump. It’s like that one guy you know who owns a lot of Lakers memorabilia despite living in Texas. The media, expectations, their own investment, the threat of being wrong or misguided, “Me? Never!”, vastly outweigh any sort of critical thinking. Its straight denial to the core.
But a vast majority? Yeah, dumb as an absorbent trash bag.
The only famous douche I know that’s very good at chess is Andrew Tate lol
If you want to beat all of your friends at chess:
learn how to mate in endgames with a few different combinations of pieces.
Castle early and on the same side of your opponent.
Learn to defend scholars mate.
Focus on piece development early on, get you back rank pieces out (bishops knights)
Fight for the center
When attacking a square, just count how many other pieces are attacking and defending that square and see if you have more than your opponent, this is a great way to quickly analyze an attacks value.
Trade when you have a piece advantage, this is like taking a math question and simplyifing the terms. It greatly simplifies the game and brings it in to the the end game with an advantage.
Learn any one opening system just a few branches that can consistently bring you into tactics (static analysis of the board state) even or with a slight advantage.
These tips can be accomplished in a week and will dominate anyone who ‘just knows the rules’
Got it. To beat my friends at chess i just need to learn to play chess.
Funny, but really, those things are marginally more effort than learning the rules and are a far cry from the level of effort it takes to actually be considered broadly ‘good’ at chess.
Learning one opening system can be done in about an hour and most of the tactics advice is just things to think about as you play.
I also think it’s a generational thing.
Back then, since chess was associated with intelligence, a lot of academic types tried to play it and get good at it.
I would say once we had computers, there was another much more practical thing you could get good at.
But seriously, chess sets used to be part of the house decor.
People need to stop putting chess on a pedestal. Its a game. General intelligence has no bearing. Its a specific skillset you can hone by practice and research, just like any other game.
It is a super deep game for how simple it is, i think that’s the “genius” part. But remembering openings in chess and their names doesn’t make you a genius, it makes you a genius in chess.
Almost anything where memorization is the primary skill is going to be dominated by people with specific interest, rather than general high intelligence (certainly doesn’t exclude it, but it’s just statistics). Gotta look for something frequently requiring novel problem solving and adaption to filter for high probability of high general intelligence.
Then there’s also a lot of games requiring very narrow intellectual ability. Being able to parse a specific ruleset, or doing a specific kind of math fast, without needing to be able to handle anything novel. You’ll certainly find some “interesting individuals” around those kinds of games.
Based on the number of comments in this thread, apparently this is a common misconception. Memorization is not the primary skill of chess. Knowledge of chess principles and common ideas, strategies, and tactics and the ability to synthesize those ideas with elements of the current position are the primary skill of chess. In fact, novel problem solving is very fundamental to the game.
Opening theory prep ultimately makes up a pretty small part of the game (though it is more pronounced at top levels of play). The primary purpose of studying openings is not to just memorize a bunch of lines (though having lines prepped is helpful), but to understand the common thematic elements that arise from said openings and common middlegame positions and ideas.
Being able to parse a specific ruleset, or doing a specific kind of math fast
Oh man, I would love competitive tabletop games, where the goal isn’t to min/max your build, but to min/max your build after being given a brand new system and 45 minutes to read the rules.
Lol, I can relate. My friends are always surprised how good I am at a game when I’m playing for the first time (mostly card games, and board games). But I quickly get bored, so never get to be actually good at any of those.
Same with language. I can pick up a little bit of any language fairly quickly, but to actually learn it, I basically need to be forced e.g. live in a place where most people don’t speak anything else.
Gotta look for something frequently requiring novel problem solving and adaption to filter for high probability of high general intelligence.
So, to riff off another commenter - league of legends 😅
Boy is it a toxic and frustrating game but I will give it credit where it’s due, you have to make good tactical decisions in not a lot of time.
I’m sure overwatch et al. work as well.
If you’re going to give a “MOBA” as an example, at least go for Dota 2, then. Having played both, LoL is quite one-dimensional and rather repetitive. Of course, you don’t have to be smart or skillful to play either, but top Dota 2 players/pros are really something else.
I play Pokémon Unite a lot. Very wide variation in abilities and skillsets
Exactly, Chess is Mario Kart.
Anyone can learn how to play Chess. Anyone can learn how to play Mario Kart.
You slap a controller in someone’s hand tell them “A” is go and they can play Mario Kart. Sure they have to learn the track, where to collect power ups, where the shortcuts are, and eventually they have to learn about and master drifting.
But being a genius in Mario Kart doesn’t make you a genius. No heist movie ever said, “And this genius over here? They scored first place in 200cc Special Cup.”
I want a version of chess where if you’re down enough material, you have the opportunity to take out half your opponent’s pieces
I think anarchy chess allows for such rulings.
I used to play Atomic Chess a lot, it could also be a good modification along the same lines.
It’s that to be good you have to think several moves ahead. Being able to predict and plan out you and the opponents next 5 moves takes intelligence.
Would be hilarious if Hollywood moved away from chess to show someone being smart and instead showed them yelling at teammates in League of Legends.
Chess is mostly a memorisation game for gambits / openers and subsequent sets of follow-on moves.
After that, it’s mentally simulating the board state a few moves ahead, varying pieces and guesstimating probability of what move the opponent will make. A lot of that you start to memorise, especially since other chess enthusiasts will often play well-known gambits / strategies.
Intelligence often correlates with memory but they’re not one and the same. I grew up knowing a competitive chess player and remember the time they referred to their “hambag” (handbag). English was their mother tongue…
This is not at all what chess is. This reads to me like you don’t really play chess?
Like sure, good chess players have studied opening theory for the openings they play (and top players know at least some theory about most competitive openings), but there’s so much more to the game than simple memorization. Memorizing a bunch of lines and doing nothing else will get you nowhere with the game. Chess is about principles, concepts, ideas, strategies. It’s about tactics and positional ideas and how the two intersect. It’s about tempo and conducting the initiative. There’s a reason it’s the game with the most number of books written about it by a large margin. It’s an incredibly deep game that rewards investment and fine-tuning your own learning process (and, in fact, a great deal of unlearning bad ideas you learned earlier).
It is decidedly not a game about memorization, even if there is some amount of it involved. At high level of play, memorization (or what we simply call “prep”) is table stakes for playing the actual game. At lower levels, many players don’t know a lot of opening theory and simply rely on some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation.
Do you know what rating your friend was at? In my experience, the super strong players I’ve met (including a Senior Master that occasionally visits our chess club who’s 2450 USCF or so) are incredibly intelligent and sharp. Anecdotally in my own chess career (only ~1134 USCF atm, though I think I’m a bit underrated due to my last tournament being in 2023), I’ve definitely noticed a difference in my own thinking since I started studying chess. Progressing in chess involves a lot of meta-cognitive thinking, and that kind of thing translates to all kinds of things in life.
“Ah ha! I see you’ve played the Frenchman’s Cumsock. I will have checkmate in 4 moves!”
Wait, my hand is still on the piece… I… have … not… completed… my… move
“I understood that reference”
KOLANAKI
Yeah I was sorta interested in pursuing Chess more at least as a hobby a few years ago. Learning about the ‘meta’ strategy was kind of intimidating and discouraging. The basic strategy is interesting to me but learning and memorizing different games just sounds awful to me. I guess it’s like most things - the more you learn about it the more you realize there is a lot more to it than what you initially thought it was.
I’ll gladly eat shit for a controversial opinion, but I mentally put chess pros in the same basket as those guys that would queue solely for Office in counterstrike and reach global elite. Like sure, it’s still an impressive time commitment, I just feel like there were better things to put that into. I hate MOBAs and yet I’d respect a professional DOTA player more? But I’m more than familiar with the fanbase of Chess and how defensive they get.
The person who taught me chess was constantly perplexed by my bizarre tactics. He found it refreshing and interesting. Obviously, I had no idea what I was doing, and I got nuked to oblivion on a regular basis. Maybe he was expecting to see some popular moves, but was only faced with whatever sketchy tactics I could come up with.
this is inaccurate. edit tbd
I have a mishmash dialect as we moved around a lot when I was a child; very rural, too. I’ll say “hambag” and “ain’t” and “me an’ this guy” and my sister says “ambliance”, but we spell it all correctly.
Did your chess expert know the spelling and say it wrongly, or was there confusion about the spelling too?
They thought it was because the leather was from a pig…
I think it’s a good name if it’s a pigskin bag. Gonna start calling my wife’s bag that now. Most of her other bags are nylon or whatever, but on she’s had for 20 years is some kind of leather.
Ain’t ain’t a non-word. I’ll fight anybody who says otherwise.
ITT: I don’t play chess. I don’t like chess. Friend play chess, he dumb, I am smart. I agree. You hear of Rubik’s cube?
Your skill at chess is indeed very good at predicting one thing: your chess rating. I have been playing every day for almost 2 years and I take lessons, but I started as an adult after finishing my PhD in actual rocket science and supervising a research lab in that area for 10 years. Consequently, I will never be as good as the 10 year olds playing with coaching since they were 6. I have met exactly one good player through my connections to that lab in 17 years. So here are some perspectives on chess if you played in high school or you “learned how to play in 30 mins and think it’s boring”:
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It’s a game with layers. The first layer is knowing how the pieces move, the second layer is memorizing openings, and the third layer is some basic knowledge of tactics (I.e., forks, skewers, pins, removing the defense, etc etc) and THEN you learn the game. Most people never learn the game unless you went out of your way to do so.
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For reason 1, “good at chess” is a hugely subjective statement. You knew a few people who can beat all your friends? Cool. I was that guy and it took me MONTHS to get to what the chess world calls “intermediate”: 1200-1400 ELO. Your friend is probably rated 700 to 750. You have probably never met more than a handful of good chess players in your life unless you were in a university club or better.
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You do not have to be typically smart to be good at chess, but it doesn’t hurt. Top GMs are sometimes impressively smart or impressively… Uh… susceptible to misinformation cough Kramnik cough. But what they CAN do is master the shit out of board positions, visualization, and prediction.
Case in point, Hikaru Nakamura, arguably world #2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WsEQuoOz-c&t=490
Or you can watch him play blindfolded chess against actual good players, or speedrun 1 minute games winning hundreds in a row while talking about his pineapple shirt. He’s alternatingly pretty entertaining and kind of annoying to listen to.
If you are that kind of smart, the visualization and memory kind, yeah you’re probably going to also be a good chess player. Otherwise, there’s not a lot of traceability that I’ve seen research on.
All that said, this thread is absolutely annoying to see the whole world show up and talk out of their asses about it.
/end rant
Edit:
More Hikaru craziness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhDYSNbPs_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXDol9GqK64
Completely agree. Just a bunch of people who clearly don’t play the game and know nothing about it talking out of their asses.
IMO you can’t have a serious opinion about the game without having actually played it competitively. If you’re just somebody that’s casually played a couple games with friends and family, your opinion about the game isn’t really relevant.
“show me your non-provisional rating and then we can talk”. Yeah I agree. But then this is the internet and everyone is an expert at being an expert lol
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[odd topic?]
This is from an essay about writers. The author said that you see a lot of architects in movies because it’s a fast and easy way to convey that someone is ‘artistic’ and a bit of a dreamer. It doesn’t matter that real life architects are much more about engineering that artistry; it works for a character.
The same thing with chess, it’s a fast and easy way to present a ‘smart’ character.
Architects or advertising executives. Sometimes lead male is one and lead female is the other.
I think it was one of the writers on Cracked that opined it’s because those are the only jobs screenwriters partially understand. They’re people who pitch ideas to customers, kind of like screenwriters do with scripts. So you get a lot of main characters that have a weirdly large amount of down time, a looming deadline to present an idea for an ad campaign or building to your boss and the three executives your boss is kissing up to. Is it the moment of triumph for our main character, has our main character had a change of heart that he can’t run a greenwashing campaign for ExxonMobile anymore because hippy dippy love interest got to him, and now his previous life is going to fall apart and he’s going to start over as a shop owner in a small town or something…
I’ve noticed that a lot of the women in rom-coms are bakers.
Then you’ve got the Hallmark movie they’ve remade 90,000 times now, where the women are usually some kind of lawyer or executive or something, who travels to a small town likely where she was raised for some contrived reason only to find what she really needs: Some stuffed flannel with designer stubble.
I want that in the next satire. A business card with
Angelina Jolie
Some kind of executive
Or lawyer
on it
I think my top favorite business card simply said
John Doe
Legitimate Businessman
I remember a sign from The Simpsons.
Legitimate Italian Businessmen’s Club.
Also from that episode “It’s an Italian American Mexican stand-off!”
That’s because playing chess doesn’t make you smart it just makes you better at playing chess
Good chess players, though, exhibit some common traits which are shared with “smart people”: the ability to think in abstract terms, and a good memory.
Your success at chess is often based on how far in advance you can plan a game at any point on the board, greatly supplemented by your ability to remember entire games of famous matches. These skills are frequently exhibited by people considered smart. However, as you and OP point out, you have to play, practice, and memorize to get good; merely knowing the rules and being smart doesn’t get you there.
Learning a few chess pro tips will make you better than anyone trying to figure that game out.
The top levels of chess are skill but the bottom is people doing pre-learned openers.
I recall some top player saying that he’d deliberately do a really ‘bad’ move at the start of a game and watch his opponents head explode because they’d never seen any top level player do that.
That checks out. I think I beat most of my friends simply because I remember a chess aficionado mentioning the center as being important to hold.
As a child I attended a chess club. There were no lessons. People simply played chess against each other.
I learned less in my entire years there than I did later in life in reading chess tips such as this page.
https://lichess.org/study/y14Z6s3N/A9uqbWxr
Looking back at those games I could recognize ways in which I was beaten by two moves in hindsight. But I had no idea about macro such as controlling the center or moving out the knights early were generally advantageous moves.
Disclaimer: not calling myself smart or anything.
I always found chess boring, for some reason. Like, not because it is too complex, but because it isn’t complex enough, in a way. As an example, the first time I tried my hand at Medieval II: Total War, I fell in love with all things strategy.
I still can’t do chess, though… It’s like my mind goes to its happy place halfway through a match and I start making moves just to progress the game and be done with it. Gimme a 4X game, and I’d need reminders to pee every 12 hours.
Well there is not a lot of action going on in a chess game and you are a lot of patience, I guess that makes it feel boring for you.
Honestly, I don’t think the action’s the problem, I enjoyed creating interlinked databases with tens of thousands of entries in Spreadsheets. I think it’s strictly to do with the complexity itself, I need more. I like the concept of every piece having a specific move set, I’d just need more of them. And add more complexity to them, but at that point may as well just play grand scale combat games, like 40k.
Edit: plus, to be honest, this lack of complexity doesn’t even let me properly enjoy a victory. Maybe it has some fetishistic tinges at this point, but a protracted victory is so much sweeter, make me feel like I pulled my brain through high intensity training for a couple of hours. Either that, or something which can start acting as a reflex, like backgammon.
I dont play a lot of chess and I’m bad at it but I recommend playing chess puzzles or timed chess. If it helps, just think of it as a mini skermish on one area of the “map”.
While there is competitive chess, I think the advantage it has over most things is that many people know how to play and that most of the time its a casual background game. Like you aren’t trying to win, you are trying to not lose.
When someone is playing at a house party, it’s so much fun to make wierd faces after they played a move or so.
In my teenage years I really tried to master it well. I score relatively high in chess.com and lichess but I share your sentiment. If you are a chess master it doesnt mean you are super smart it means you are super good at chess.
Science confirms this in a way. Prof Andrew Huberman has a podcast episode about games in general and their effect the brain development and the takeaways:
- Games can help the brain development according to publications because of the different experiences that you will never have irl
- The positive impact was only noticed when you play a variety of games under different setups and not when you master a single game and play it a lot
Yeah I always laugh when movies or TV portrait a character being good at strategy by depicting them being good at chess. Those two have zero relation. Total war on the other hand, get good at that and you’re cracked at strategy
„The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.“
So… disclaimer first! I have played chess but only a year or so; I got into chess during the pandemic and had a peak ELO of ~1600+ on chess.com and 1900+ on Lichess; probably translates to a classical ELO of ~1200 (competition is tough in classical…). Obviously I’m not remotely a good player, but I can hold my ground. I also had to do a neuropsych evaluation recently for mental health reasons, so I spent the last month of my free time looking into research of intelligence (g factor, IQ tests, the disturbing history, etc…) for my own curiosity. So I might have a bit of knowledge on this… but:
For the most part chess is its own unique skills and is unrelated to “smartness”. Nevertheless, I think chess might be related to probably just one or two specific narrow fields of intelligence. Being good at chess requires one to be knowledgeable of various chess openings (memorization, working memory), extremely strong pattern recognition (Magnus Carlsen is really good at this; AlphaZero was literally all pattern recognition due to the way it works), and being able to see 5, 10, or even 15 steps ahead and consider all the rational options (again, working memory)
I just took the WAIS-V test two weeks ago for my psych eval, and they do indeed test for working memory and pattern recognition in specific sub-tasks. However the difference is… IQ tests are never meant to be practiced as they measure a type of “potential” if you may, but chess is all about what you actually play on the board. Sure maybe if ppl were literally just given the rules and had no prior exposure then a smarter person might spot a forced checkmate faster, but ppl do pratice for the game… In fact, the advice people used to give to get better at chess is… to do more puzzles
Sooo… methinks an intelligent person might have a slight edge training themselves to do the above, but there is probably otherwise very little association. After a certain point intelligence itself probably has no influence on chess performance whatsoever, and realistically it’s more about “grit”, or how much time/effort someone puts into the game
Aaand… case in point. Apparently Kasparov went through a 3-day intensive intelligence test, but had a really “spiky” profile that is more commonly seen in neurodivergent individuals; scored really high on some categories and abysmally low on others. I saw this random Reddit post which says that Carlsen scored 115(+1SD) on AGCT (a fairly quick and accurate online test), which is not low but not impressive by any means either. Nakamura allegedly got 102 on Mensa Norway’s trial test, which is not as accurate as AGCT but should be fairly good too; 102 is like dead-average
Chess takes lots of time to get very good. Any actual scientist, professor or engineer doesn’t have the time.
