Having a high IQ does not mean that you will naturally be good at chess. They are two completely different categories of intelligence. Both have their pros and cons but in the end it really doesn't matter. You are who you are.

Luke

I Q scores are just a general guide, not the be all etc.

Q: Does anyone know a stupid person who doesn't think they are shmart?

 A: No!

An astonishing finding!

That guy must have a high IQ. Maybe even into triple digits.

Hello, everybody.  I'm coming in on this late and I'm a mediocre at best (by choice to a large extent) chess player AND a Girl, but I do have a psych doctorate and 36 years of experience in the field, including college teaching and lots of practice administering and interpreting IQ tests.

(Hope that's not too much info about "me."    )

I give you my bono fides as background to my response to Meadmaker's "Acing a test when unprepared and hungover" story.  I liked the story a lot, and found it highly relevant to this stated forum topic.

Feel free to blast away---I may live in Georgia, but am Not a "delicate flower of South'en womanhood!" 

If you're dumb enough to get lured into a marriage, then this thread is obviously not for you.

Uh, oh.

mead: Oh dear.  That seems a bit harsh to me.  I try to save up my scorn for bigger issues, but if it's something you feel strongly about, then scorn, by all means.

No...no... There are scorn levels of, let's say, 1 to 10.

You only get a 1 from me. That's actually quite nice.

Why,thank you. I was hoping someone would find it amusing, or maybe someone from my alma mater would pick up on Little Kings Night.

But, more importantly, do you have any professional knowledge of the subject at hand? What interests me is whether there is any specific knowldege of other cognitive tasks that are correlated, positively or negaively,to Chess playing ability.

The link between the facial recognition area of the brain and Chess experts is very interesting to me, and is getting a lot of press in the journals, but I haven't seen anything suggesting  an actual performance relationship between facial recognition and Chess ability. (or anything else and chess abilty)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTFvzYVkNRY

Intellectual curiousity. Isn't that enough?

This thread started with someone who noted he was intelligent, but lousy at Chess.  Several other people have chimed in that they, too, fit that bill. 

So, the question is, why?

For the people who don't find that question interesting, I recommend that they skip this thread altogether, and go play Chess.  I cannot imagine the mentality of someone who hangs out in a thread solely to tell other people they are wasting their time.  For those who do find it interesting, some summaries of previous ground covered:

High IQ helps in Chess, but not as much as people might think.

Study is more important than IQ, but it has to be effective study.

Everyone within normal ranges of mental capacity can reach some level of Chess proficiency.  There has been a lot of back and forth on exactly what level of proficiency that is.  Could anyone become a grandmaster? an expert? an 1800?  a 1400?  To me, defining that level isn't a very interesting question, but here is where we run into some controversy, and hence an interesting question.

  The point is that Chess is a skill that must be learned.  No one sits down at a board and immediately plays great Chess.  Everyone can improve and learn through practice, education, and hard work. No controversy there.  However, regardless of the level of work, people will hit a threshold, and some people's threshold will be higher than others.  Furthermore, on the way to that threshold, some people will have to work a lot more than others to get there.   If I may be forgiven for using myself as a reference, yes, I am extremely confident that I could get to USCF 1200.   However, based on my experience, it would take me a lot more work to get there than it did for most of you who are already there.

So now I'm curious as to what makes Chess different from the calculus of variations with application to optimal control?  Both are perceived by the masses as being intellectual tasks, but there are people who are good at one and lousy at the other.  To put it differently, Chess ain't rocket science, and the proof is that there are a lot of rocket scientists who can't master Chess.

In my google research, it seems like the key may be that Chess is more of a perceptual task than an analytical task. 

If anyone has some knowledge or just Great Thoughts on the subject, I, for one, would love to hear them.

This thread started with someone who noted he was intelligent, but lousy at Chess.  Several other people have chimed in that they, too, fit that bill. 

So, the question is, why?

You would have a valid question IF you first explored a. studying chess, which takes lots of time...years...to master  b. stop playing blitz until you can play a decent game with longer time controls so that you can think and analyze instead of making knee jerk moves.

Duh.

Frankly, after telling you this repeatedly, I do not think you are as smart as you believe. Dense...that's the word. Very obtuse, in fact.

Now I sense a serious elevation of the aforementioned scorn level ... 

yes. Although my IQ places me in the top 2%, my chess skill puts me only in the top 10% or so.

You might have noticed that when asked "Why do you even care?", my answer did not include any reference to, "because I want to know how to improve my performance in the game of Chess."

And if you didn't notice it, then see your own post for more information.

My last post discussed the value of work and study, but I think there is ample evidence that work and study will have more benefits to some than to others, based on their innate abilities.   I'm curious about the sort of innate abilities that translate into the ability to master Chess.

To Patzerlars: Yes...I now go to Delta Level 2.

Hey, James...you could qualify for Mensa (maybe you are a member).

Me? I applied years ago. Rated 3 percentile. What a bummer...missed by 1 percentile.

The test was taken in the basement of a library with a noisy, rowdy girl scout meeting on the other side of the door, jack hammers going full force outside the windows, no air conditioning in the hot/humid summer... They don't allow for a retest, either. Not for your entire life.

But, I take full responsibility. If I did not, I'd give myself a Delta Scorn Level 10 rating.

Congratulations on being shmarter than me by 1 percentile. 

Any others with high IQ suck at chess.

Studies have been carried out on this & was re-assuring that these indicated intelligence alone did not correlate to brilliance at chess.

If success at chess is assumed or expected on the basis of IQ-level alone then dissapointment will ensue & for a while may indeed discover that you ''suck at chess''.

Intellectual abilities differ as the last comment suggests.  So, while one may excell in one or more areas, one may not excel at chess.  First, chess requires good abstact thinking to understand and apply theoretical ideas.  Good analytical skills are also extremely important.  to reach reach very high levels of performance, an ability to memorize becomes important so that one can retain many different, analyzed lines of opening play so that one may save time on his clock and already understand the current and past opening theory.  I for example, have an extremely poor memory so must rely on understanding without the knowlege of too many opening lines.  The ability to calculate many moves in advace is also very important as one improves.  Of course, one also has to have the patience to sit and think for long periods of time and deal well with adversity.