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.
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.
I’m dumb as rocks at night but I won 3rd in a competition once. My brain does that thing the DVD logo does on your TV when you’re not watching anything but I can get a bunch of bullshit into the middle of the board really fast.
I don’t have the patience to learn how to play chess well. I don’t think more than one move ahead. My favourite game is Catan.
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.
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.
Chess takes lots of time to get very good. Any actual scientist, professor or engineer doesn’t have the time.
Ron in the Harry Potter books was a borderline chess savant and in the movies he’s just kind of regarded
[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
Aha. That’s because they all play go!
Right?
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
From my experience most smart people learned and played chess at some point but few get the point of memorizing stuff. Especially if they are not good memorizes. Its a great game to teach and play with kids as it does stimulate the mind with the way the pieces move and having to think about the changing board and next move. That being said I was not even aware of en passant until I met a guy in college who actually went to competitions. Heck I rarely could remember how to castle due to how rare it was to get into a position to do so. Really though any type of stimulating activity is helpful. Someone mentioned rubicks cubes and like suduko and crosswords and really any gaming. They all have limitations. I often say crosswords is more about knowing the crossword author than anything else. They all have favorites and biases in their puzzles.
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 and 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 I 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
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.
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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.
