Any others with high IQ suck at chess.

Good one! (lol)

Now, if (hypothetically) a high IQ doesn't necessarily correlate to a high chess competence, then that would suggest a low IQ doesn't necessarily correlate, either.

I think that most of us know that study/training, application/practice, patience/time are prerequisites to success at chess.

Certainly people at age 49 can be great Chess players.  However, can they learn to become great Chess players?  I don't know.  For my part, I was not a lousy Chess player when I was young, because I was not a Chess player when I was young.  I knew the legal moves of the pieces, but I will bet that prior to my 45th birthday, I had not played 100 games of Chess, and 90 of those were between the ages of 6 and 18.

While we don't like to face it, age does not make our minds more open to new ideas, or to new skills.  I am most familiar with this in the field of language acquisition.  The ability to acquire a new language drops continuously throughout life, to the point that it is almost impossible to become fluent in a new language if you are not at least conversant in it by the time you are 35 years old.  Those people who are the exceptions that prove the rule have to be very dedicated and put in an intense amount of work, far more effort than the 12, 16, or 20 year old sitting next to them in the classroom.

I have to wonder if learning Chess skills is comparable to learning a new language in that sense.   If you learned it as a child, it can come back to you, and you can build on your skills, but what if you never learned as a child?  I can't say, but it doesn't seem outlandish to think that, just as you will never speak Japanese fluently if you try to learn at 40, you will never play great Chess if you start at 40.  Or, if you can, it would only be through an insane level of dedication.  Some counterexamples would help settle the question.

I do know that the attainment of grandmaster skills during middle age was sufficiently remarkable for GM Ben Feingold to make the cover of Chess Life as "the 40 year old grandmaster."

You make some good points. However, what I recall your complaint as being was not that you were disappointed that you won't make GM...but that you are a weak chess player.

How many hours per day do you study and practice?

I certainly don't practice two hours per day, but I'm fairly confident most of my opponents with similar ratings also don't practice two hours per day, and I'm pretty certain I didn't study math two hours per day, and I got quite good at that.

I can think of three reasons I'm not better at Chess.

1.  I don't have the "right kind" of intelligence.

2.  My study is totally ineffective.  I'm studying the wrong things, or the wrong way.

3.  I was too old to learn when I started trying.

I really have no idea which one is true.  Probably, there's some truth to all three.

The interesting question, to me, is whether number 1 might be true.  Can people be very smart, as measured in school, but lack the specific type of intellectual capacity to become good at Chess or, more accurately, require intense effort to become good at Chess.   By analogy, everyone who gets a high school diploma in America is supposed to be able to do basic algebra, but some of us instantly "got it" when we exposed to it in Jr. High School, and some people struggled with it and just barely passed, perhaps with the aid a a rather loose interpretation of the graduation criteria.

If it's the case that people who are "smart" could lack the sort of intelligence required to be a great Chess player, or to learn the game easily, are there other tasks that are correlated with being a great Chess player, but not necessarily with what is measured as IQ?

You need to decide whether you really want to improve (and pay the dues in study and time) or just have fun.

I would cut out all the speed chess. When you have played 1,089 games of blitz but only have a 1,094 rating...this is a serious problem. Learn to play well, then practice enough to play fast.

I see you did well at chess mentor but poorly at tactics. It seems to me that mentor is very much strategic. That would imply you are doing OK there. The tactics, though...87 hours and only 1,216? That's a red flag.

Players better than me might want to chime in. Also, you might want to get a coach. That could be the key thought for you.

No, it isn't.  That's crap (at least, no more than proficiency at anything is reflective of raw intelligence).  And please don't accuse me of being PC...believe me, nothing could be further from the truth.

If they keep talking about magic wands having special powers and saying that atomic theory is pure fiction and that all you have to do to move a mass is wish for it to be so...then yeah, I would tell them they're wasting their time. lol  Same as I do over and over again around here.

What's the Matter? Dark?

Neither am I, Oh well : (

In my particular case, online blitz is fun, so I'll continue.

I don't want the thread to be too strongly focused on my specific case.  I offer myself as an example of someone who is academically gifted, but is lousy at Chess, and who has put in enough time that it can be demonstrated that it isn't simply lack of effort.

(Anecdote deleted)

Let's see...

You enjoy blitz. You lose an awful lot at it. OK, fair enough...for you, certainly not for me!

I told you that I study and practice two hours per day. I asked how much time you do. You said: Not two hours. But you didn't say how much. I take that to mean 0 hours.

There are lots of guys like you.

I don't think that it's for the lack of a chess gene that you suck. I think you suck because you have no pride in getting your butt kicked more often than not (maybe you are a masochist), you refuse to pay your dues by studying, you refuse to get a coach, you refuse to learn how to play better before faster...

Here's the deal: Then stop complaining about being a bad chess player.

High IQ without the right attitude is worthless. Case closed.

IOW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MT3CihStFQ

Earlier I mentioned Circular reasoning ( has that poor dog caught his own tail yet ?  lol ). Perhaps another question that one could ask here relates to talent or ability as opposed to " IQ " measured intelligence ? We have all known people who were very good at running, playing baseball, singing, painting or sculpting ( etc etc ), often from an early age. So in regards to any specific activity what part does natural ability play ? For example Tiger Woods plays Golf, could he have been a GM at Chess ? The Polgar Sisters play Chess, could they perhaps have made it to World class at Tennis ?   

I do not suck at chess, yet there is a large gap between my measured IQ and my performance in chess, and few other intellectual fields.  I am extremely impatient, so I do much better in blitz chess.  I also go partially insane when the opposing player takes too long.

I mellowed with time, but only a bit, just enough not to be unpleasant. I suppose there is more to chess than basic intelligence.  I am answering the question as asked and did not read all those above posts.  Still impatient after all these years..gotta go..

I edited some typos, so maybe I am improving on the patience front.

cabby, you always have something pertinent to say. (lol)

I do not suck at chess...

?

Actually, I win approximately 50% of the games that I play here, and always will, due to the fact that chess.com matches based on rating.

(And I'm perfectly capable of doing the math that would show all sorts of interesting things about win frequencies, rating changes for elo ratings, uncertainties in predictions based on elo ratings and sample sizes, etc.   I just can't win the chess games.)

whatever

I'm not complaining about being a bad Chess player.  I'm observing the fact that I am a bad Chess player, despite putting in a good deal more effort than I did at many other things that I was quite proficient at.  I find that interesting. It's interesting to me that there are all these activities that are expected to be done well by "smart people", but there is, in fact,a wide range of ability across them.

(anecdote deleted) 

  Since Chess is studied using combinatorial game theory, I figured I ought to be able to ace it, just as  I had done so in the class of combinatorics.  However, it was not to be.

Intelligence isn't a simple straight line, "I'm smarter than you".  There are a lot of different aspects, and it's not clear how much is nature and how much is nurture.