Chess and Intelligence
Chess- the game has a very distinct sense of intelligence attached to it. It’s a common misconception that to play good chess, you have to be brilliant, and the top chess players are well- “superhumans” when it comes to memory and brilliance. This kind of perception is what alienates the sport a bit from the mainstream sports enthusiasts.
There are three sets of people concerning chess- the champions: “the ones who achieved their full potential,” the prodigies: “young ones who show great skill for the game, the ones who might go on to be champions,” and the lovers: “the people who might not be highly skilled players but know enough to appreciate it’s beauty and complexity.”
The third set of people is what makes chess different from other sports. Excellent physical effort is visible in sports like tennis and soccer. You don’t need any knowledge to appreciate that, but in chess, to recognize the beauty of a move, you require a basic understanding of chess, the tactical motifs, among other things.
Chess improves concentration and decision-making skills. It also teaches patience, realizing a chance, and making the best out of your resources, but it is not a sign of mental superiority. If someone has put in plenty of work in learning to play good chess, his IQ has no relation with his chess skills. It all relates to practice, repetition, and pattern recognition based on the amount of work done by an individual.
A famous chess player Paul Morphy once(jokingly), said:
“The ability to play chess is a sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is a sign of wasted life.”
If you want to be a casual player putting in some hours a day is enough, no hokum of intelligence or IQ. Even the top chess players like Hikaru Nakamura have an IQ of 103, which puts him as an average individual but, his chess skills are formidable. On the other hand, Judit Polgar, the strongest woman chess player of all time, who is supposed to have an IQ of 150, is not as strong a chess player as Nakamura.
I am not deriving any conclusions but playing excellent chess has little to do with IQ. As we all know that grandmasters can remember chess positions from a single glance, they can even recall the move orders. Still, a study showed that putting the pieces in nonsensical order with no pattern recognition to help them, grandmasters struggled to remember. Top Chess players agree that it has little to do with IQ and more to do with their brutal training regimes, which began from childhood and the positions, subtleties, and techniques becoming engrained like muscle memory.
Clearing these misconceptions is a significant step towards bringing more people into this beautiful game. They should not correlate their losses to weak mental fortitude because it has more to do with practice than brilliance, as explained before. But, chess is a brutal game. You play for several hours and a slight misstep, and you can lose the game in a matter of seconds. Chess is like life in that aspect.
As for my part, I am an aficionado. I may not find the beautiful moves myself, but I can appreciate a move when I see one. For all of you who are unfamiliar with the game, I would recommend trying it because it suits all types of people, and it is said:
“The mentality and approach of a person towards life is visible in their playing style.”
