Judo Talent vs. Chess Talent. A Case Study With Children

Good time of day when you are reading this,

This is my first (maybe only, maybe not) blog ever. I decided to write this for two main reasons. One of them was my friend @VOB96 who encouraged me to do so. She is organizing some blogging competitions on Chess.com and invited me to watch and participate. Reading so many blogs from different users lately has probably made me want to make one of my own.

The second is the fact that the data you are about to see and read has been with me for a few years and I have never made it public, so I think this is a good opportunity to do so. In summary, it is a kind of "scientific" research that I have done by observing some children and their behavior in sports. I put the word in quotes because it lacks a lot of important requirements to be considered real science, but it still has some value, or at least it is curious.

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INTRODUCTION

For those who don't know, I've been a judo teacher (sensei) for children at a primary school for almost ten years, having started as an assistant in 2016 and becoming the main sensei in 2018. And unless you're suffering from serious memory loss, you'll remember that in 2020, the world was in a massive lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, judo and other physical sports were not allowed during those hard times.

The kids started having online classes, but trying to teach them judo online would probably cost me a few broken laptops that I would have to reimburse their parents for. So, I asked the school board if I could give them chess lessons as a substitute. I'm not a master or even an advanced player, but I have the necessary knowledge to teach children to play.

Having got their agreement, I decided to do a little experiment to see if there was any correlation between strength in martial arts and chess. Yes, they are just kids, and the number is not even that big, so it is not really scientific, but I thought it might be fun. I will try to summarize my idea below:

     1) At that time, I had two classes, one with 21 pupils and the other with 24. If you are good enough at math, you will deduce that I had 45 students.

     2) I gave each of them a score from 1 to 10 in different aspects of judo (names have been replaced with numbers in this blog for privacy reasons). The ones with a W next to them are the girls. I know that gender differences are not so relevant at this age, but I still preferred to follow them separately.

     3) I would then follow their chess performance and development and try to give them scores in the same items after a while to see how they correlate or not.

The factors I evaluated were the following:

• Competitiveness in that sport
• Physical strength
• Intellectual strength (based on their school grades and what I knew of them)
• Natural talent for the sport
• Willingness to improve
• Concrete results in games/fights, tournaments, etc.

This is the table I made after many hours of thinking about what I had seen of them. The 10 and 9 are marked in green. The 1 and 2 are marked in red, for easier visualization:

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ASSESSMENT PERIOD

I made sure to give each child their score in all the items before the chess lesson started and then began to follow their performance on the board to see if it was similar to the mat. My main goal was to answer some basic questions such as:

    A) Does a certain strength in a more physical sport such as judo mean that the same strength will show up in an intellectual activity such as chess?

   B) What strengths might be important to their performance in both? And which are more important in only one?

     C) Do the same pupils show more (or less) natural talent for the activities, or the opposite?

     D) Is there a clear difference between boys and girls?

The chess lessons lasted about a year, from March 2020 to April or May 2021. They were not every day, only twice a week, and none of them was the next Faustino Oro, so don't expect any miracle results. Still, I think it was enough time to evaluate them and make this fun little study.

This is the table I ended up with:

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MY (NON-SCIENTIFIC) INTERPRETATION OF THE DATA

Ok, I know that showing the data in a table is not optimal, but plotting in a graph was also very hard in this case. Below I try to show the results more clearly, at least for what I considered to be the most important points. Check out some of the conclusions I came to after comparing the tables:

1) The children who are more competitive in judo also proved to be more competitive in an intellectual activity like chess. I might have expected that those who cared about being "strong" would not care as much about being "smart", or vice versa, but that is not what the data showed me.

2) Those who were physically stronger were not necessarily those who were "intellectually" stronger. This can't be generalized to avoid prejudice, but in the case of this group of children, it was quite clear.

3) Natural ability in judo was more strongly associated with competitiveness, whereas natural ability in chess seemed to be more related to the willingness to improve.

     3.a) Those who were more competitive in judo were the ones who always showed to have more potential, coincidence or not. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are the same who often ask me for more tips and to learn new techniques.

     3.b) In chess, I found that the competitive boys tended to be afraid to ask me questions and wanted to prove themselves on their own. Perhaps the fact that it is an intellectual sport makes them think that asking for help can be seen as admitting that they are stupid. But the ones who realized they were talented asked more and more questions about the game.

4) As you might expect, physical strength was reflected in better results in judo, and intellectual strength was more valuable in chess. I was a little disappointed, hoping that something against common sense would be revealed here, but that was not the case.

5) But regardless of talent or strength, in both sports the willingness to improve was the most important factor in achieving better results. Teachers are essential, who would have thought?

6) The small number of girls made it difficult to make a direct comparison, but in general, although they were less competitive than boys in judo, this difference in competitiveness was even greater in chess. While in judo they showed at least some desire and pride in winning, in chess they were almost indifferent.

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SOME IMPORTANT OBSERVATIONS

Regardless of the results, we must remember that all these children came to judo voluntarily when they chose the sport to practice at school, while the chess lessons were "forced" by the circumstances of the pandemic. So, we are talking about a group of kids who probably have a more natural preference for the former and less for the latter. And this applies to all of them.

Also, this is a small group of people and research done by a curious person who didn't really use a proper method, so take the data and conclusions with a grain of salt and be aware that they are not scientifically valid.

Please remember that I am only their teacher, not their mother. This means that my assessment of their strengths and weaknesses is based solely on what I perceive from the relatively small amount of time I have had with them and may not reflect the whole truth.

And most importantly, we must never forget that THEY ARE CHILDREN! Nothing shown here says anything about their character or the adults they will become!

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DOES THE SAME APPLY TO ADULTS?

As I don't work with adults, I didn't have a lot of data to work with. However, there are two little experiments I have done.

The first one involved me and the other sensei in the same school, who is responsible for two other groups. Usually, at the end of each semester, we do a fun event where the kids from each class fight each other to see who wins more matches. They take it very seriously, it is cute.

The grand finale, of course, is a fight between their sensei. So far there have been 11 editions in which we both participated. 2018 (2x), 2019 (2x), 2021 (Only 1x due to COVID-19), 2022 (2x), 2023 (2x), and 2024 (2x). I lead 8-3.

If you paid attention, you would see that this "event" was not held in 2020, for obvious reasons. As I was teaching chess to my children while he, if I am not mistaken, was concentrating on some other e-sports, it was not possible to have a chess clash of the classes.

Nevertheless, we played some chess games. He knew the basic rules but had to be reminded of the final position of the long castle and that pinned pieces could not move. Based on that, I hope you can guess who won them.

So, the first experiment shows that the adult with the better results in judo also had a clear advantage in chess. Or you can rightly assume that I am just wasting your time to boast that I won both.

The second was a little more serious. I have two very close friends, Maria and Victoria, who trained judo with me in our youth when we were between 18 and 24 years old. As we were the only three women in the dojo, there was a hidden rivalry between us, despite our friendship.

I knew that playing chess against them would be pointless, but I still tried something interesting. Firstly, I asked them if they could tell me their approximate judo score against each other. As you can imagine, we had fought each other many times, so an exact score was not possible, but after heated discussion and strong accusations, they estimated that Maria had won about 60% of their bouts.

Then I taught them to play chess. The whole process took about 90 minutes, so you can imagine that after such a long time of dedication, they both turned into real Polgár sisters. Time to play the games.

Despite needing some help to give the checkmate of two rooks against a king in the first game, and mistakenly announcing it too early in the second, Vicky, who I always thought was a little more intelligent, won both games quite convincingly.

This confused me. In my case, I had won in both sports, so I was sure that this pattern would hold, but surprisingly, among my friends, the one who had won more judo fights lost badly at chess.

So, the only real indisputable conclusion I can draw after analyzing so much data in such depth is that women are unquestionably better at both.

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CONCLUSION

Ok, everything in the above section about adults is not to be taken seriously. I was just having a bit of fun, but maybe the part about the children has some value. I hope you enjoyed seeing the results and my interpretation.

But given that I am not a statistician, and that the method is not optimal, smarter people may see some insights and patterns that I could not. This was another good reason to finally write this text and share the topic.

Therefore, if you've noticed something I've missed, or if you have other possible explanations, or even if you think it's all inconclusive, please let me know in the comments. As I tried to make clear from the start, nothing here is strictly scientific or done with the necessary professional care, but I thought it was worth sharing anyway.

Thanks for reading my first blog!

*I know some of the words can sound cruel to use with kids, especially "intellect", but that was never done talking to them or their parents. I just didn't know which ones would fit better in English for this blog.