Can intelligent person suck at chess, forever?

How does knowing the year of Elvis's birth qualify you as smart?

That's useless knowledge. 

Do you think GM's just sat down at their first game of chess and dominated? 

They had to study like the rest of us.

Intelligence helps with learning chess, calculating variations, remembering positions (pattern recognition) etc. Obviously a person of average intelligence who devotes a lot of time to studying the game is going to be better at it than a person of superior intelligence who plays only once in a while

Fischer's IQ was said to be 180; I doubt he would have gotten as far as he did if his IQ were 120, regardless of how hard he worked.

I don't think that has to do with intelligence, I think it has more to do with knowledge and pattern recognition which comes from years of practice. 

Not even a genius could sit down and play remarkable chess without learning some theory.

I don't think that IQ is from a certified test. 

What I've read is that great chessplayers are about average when it comes to an IQ test, but excel in the visual part of the test where they tend to be better than almost everyone else.

I think it has more to do with knowing patterns and motifs than anything else.

Plus, it's hard to take the test seriously. 

Fischer claimed to have read 10,000 chess books in his lifetime. He spend almost every waking hour studying it. 

It's not as if he just casually sat down and crushed his opponent. 

Natural ability has to be facilitated by knowledge, and his was.

IMO anyone can achieve a high rating.  Of course, I'm a patzer...  Anyway, here's some thoughts.

1. submit your games for computer analysis to get another view on what's going on.  When your opponent moves their rook and you don't understand, who's to say they're right?  Maybe it's a blunder.

2. Study tactics.  Study tactics.  Study tactics.

3. I read a quote: "when you have deeply annotated 200 master level games, you too will be a master."  It's slow going, but I first play the game 3-4 times through so that it's not memorized, but deeply familiar.  Then I do some annotation.  Then I used to submit it to computer analysis, then I'd combine all this with the annotations from some high level annotator.  You can buy lots of books of annotated games.

4. Get Silman's "How to Reassess Your Chess".  it's the book that taught me to understand chess.  I read every page, played through every move of every game, and it made a big difference.

Having a high IQ means very little. Some players just have the gift.

Fischer was a Genius

OK, well the conclusion seems to be that a high IQ will likely be helpful to someone who studies chess. Good.

On a more practical note, suppose someone wanted to become sharper, for whatever reason. Maybe he wants to think faster and miss fewer things. Is he better off here or at Luminosity.com?

There is no conclusion that a high intelligence makes a great chess player.

There is no correlation. It's just a myth. 

Yeah, Yereslov's right (just like he was right about Morphy being a modern-day patzer.)

Get two people who have never played played chess - one with an IQ of 80, the other with an IQ of 200. Give them the same books to study chess from for three months. Arrange a match. See who wins.

Stop trolling, Yereslov.

Yereslov seems to be arguing there's no correlation between intelligence and ability in chess. What's wrong with setting everything equal except intelligence?

1. Not everyone is built the same. Intelligence in one area does not equate to intelligence in another. 

2. If the player with an IQ of 80 is simply better at seeing motifs and chess patterns than his opponent, then he will certainly win over the player with a higher IQ. 

3. There are players of far higher IQ who have never made it past 1600-1700 USCF. It has nothing to do with the fact that they are stupid, it has to do with the fact that chess ability is not in the same realm as all-encompassing intelligence.

4. Players vary in ability. Fischer was not exactly a rocket scientist. His greatest accomplishment was in chess. That's it. He was one of the lucky few who had a natural understanding of the game.

There are many man who had higher IQ's who played chess. They didn't exactly become a success.

Now stop trying to simplify life though IQ scores. They are meaningless numbers that are based on a faulty test.

"Intelligence" does not mean "easy comprehension or mastery over everything you grasp," it merely means that the individual is very perceptive or picks up information much faster than another.

NewScientist magazine did a study on GM's and what makes them top of the hill, which was quite interesting, search their website and check it out.

I recall it said their was a top codebreaker who loved chess but even with coaching he was still well under master level.

Chess is more about visual perception than thinking alone.

What else has he done besides play chess? He's going to die being a famous chess player, not a famous scientist or philosopher.

Chess ability does not equate with intelligence in the same way that mastering the sword does not equate intelligence.

These are just methods. Nothing more.

Chess is just a game consisting of visual puzzles.

It's really no different from sudoku.

You don't agree with me because you have a notion that can't be supported by anything else except the statement that "being excellent in the game of chess is a sure sign of intelligence,"

It's a self-defeating argument. It's just chess ability. That's it. 

It's a game, not a revolutionary serum that cures AIDS or a book that builds  civilzations.