Does I.Q. = rating?!

excellent point!

and if you sharp-shoot spacial recognition tests, clerical and arithmetical skills at all levels, you MAY score high on IQ tests too....   but that does not make you smart.

      there is 'test IQ' and applied IQ.  some folks are 'naturals' at sharpshooting tests but don't have the skills to apply their intellect in 'real-world' scenarios.   Others are unable to test well, but are sharp as a tack at applications.

    and still others play chess like fiends but don't give a hoot about IQ tests because they don't read much, have poor verbal and arithmetic skills, and are considered average in tested IQ.

Maybe the question should be revised to "do you thing chess players are more intelligent than the general population?" Although I have never played a IM/NM/WGM/GM, my subjective view is that my chess playing friends are more knowledgeable and thoughtful (i.e. intelligent) about the world around them.

   Chess is not about IQ.  It is about three things, will to win, serious study, and concentration.  Obviously the game of chess is easier for some, than for others.  It never hurts to learn chess at five years old as Capablanca did.  Tchaikovsky sat alone at the family piano and composed music when he was five.

Bumpin' up those year and a half old threads.

Very well said Billy. That is exactly what I was looking for.  The will to win is half of the battle if you ask me..

Many top rated players must surely have photographic memories (eidetic) like Bobby Fischer. It begs the question: "How good would they be without this ability?" or, "Is skill at chess primarily due to an above average memory capability?"

They would be better without eidetic memories. In the late nineteenth century, Alfred Binet (the man that invented IQ tests) studied the memories of strong chess players and put to rest in the professional literature the still common popular belief that eidetic memory offers an advantage. For chess, eidetic memory could be a disadvantage. A person with an eidetic memory could remember the placement of all pieces on the chessboard after a quick glance whether they were placed there randomly or whether the position was from an actual game between masters. Strong chess players have shown in repeated studies that they have no peculiar ability to recall randomly placed pieces, but a significant ability to recall a position from an actual game.

Google Video has a documentary ("My Brilliant Brain"--nineteen minutes in) that includes a test of Susan Polgar asked to produce two chess positions on a board after seeing each position for a few seconds as a van that had the position painted on the side drove bu on the street. She had no difficulty with one from a historic game, but could not reproduce the randomly placed pieces in the second diagram.

I'd like to see your source for the claim that Fischer had an eidetic memory, as I believe the evidence weighs heavily against it.

Not savant but ... autistic_chess_expert_wins_horatio

People with low iq generally dont play chess or pursue anything academic. People normally gravitate to what they are good at not to what they are bad at. I can state with 100% confidence that no one with an iq of 85 or lower can be a  Master  in chess.

Dick Cavett: Is chess a gift?  Could a guy who doesn't have a gift for it be a great chess player?

Bobby Fischer:  Great, no.  He could be good though.  A lot of the top players I don't think are that talented.  They just work like dogs.

Dick Cavett: Is it inherited?

Bobby Fischer: No.  I mean my mind is inherited...

...

Dick Cavett: What's the greatest pleasure corresponding to hitting the home run in baseball?

Bobby Fischer: When you break his ego.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ0YPXightc

Here is the article by Frank Brady, Ziryab (from a recent chess.com blog): http://blog.chess.com/kyranlucien/the-mind-of-bobby-fischer - (there are other articles as well). I take your point that it may not be proven, only speculated.

IQ is 99% perspiration and hardwork and 1% mind. So many person with  lower IQ is more successful than a person with very high IQ because they used their mind not their intellectual brain capacity. 

"That's completely absurd. I have an IQ of 138, and I stink at chess." - jazzTUNE

Is it COMPLETELY absurd ??

IQ and performance at chess are likely related somehow seeing how IQ is a meaure of how well the brain can function.

This from a guy that claims to have an IQ of 138. Strange.

Brady says:

"In previous writings I
have cited Fischer's I.Q. as in the range of 180, a very high genius.
My source of information is impeccable: a highly regarded political
scientist who coincidentally happened to be working in the grade
adviser's office at Erasmus Hall - Bobby Fischer's high school in
Brooklyn - at the time Fischer was a student there. He had the
opportunity to study Fischer's personal records and there is no
  reason to believe his figure is inaccurate."

But there seems to be every reason to conclude the 180 figure is inaccurate. Someone, even a psychologist, looking over Fischer's academic records and somehow surmising such a high IQ figure is just ridiculous, and we don't see any evidence that his source was a psycholgist--the kind of person whose expertise is required to administer IQ tests and  derive a credible score from them, and I would suggest the higher the IQ claim the more necessary that a test be the source of that claim. Brady's man doesn't even appear to be qualified for this kind of opinion.

Yet  there was no IQ test ever administered, apparently.

That Brady discounts the opinion of the person who says other teachers remember a much lower figure ought to be discarded due to lack of evidence is amusing. His own story falls lacking a credible foundation as well.

Typically, in my experience and as I remember, we young students would sometimes take as a group a written verbal test that eventually we would get some kind of result from, such as a a ranking in 5 or 6 levels for the handful of categories we were tested on (including some natural science as well as verbal skills). If Fischer was tested at all as a 9th or 10th grader it was likely a test no more sophisticated (or reliable) than this. Some percentile ranking could be extracted, but again this would be a crude metric from an even cruder test.

If Fischer's score was drawn from his HS "work" then I'd say it was even less reliable than any of those group tests I refer to above.

Forget the 180 IQ tale.

You're taking the "I.Q.= Rating" OP too literally Tony! Sorry to disappoint, lol .

What was that formula? I.Q. x 10 + 1000 = Max Rating?

Thank you. I had a vague recollection of Brady saying something like that in his book, too. David Shenk's The Immortal Game, on the other hand, discusse the research of psychologists and other scholars into the relationship between memory and chess. That book is a good place to start (it has references) in your study of chess, memory, and I.Q.

My point would be that Frank Brady misunderstands the science of memory and thus helps perpetuate this common error.

Your source does support the claim the Fischer was reputed to have an eidetic memory. Such claims by those that fail to understand the nature of memory, that fail to understand why eidetic memory is more likely an disadvantage in chess, might be abundant. Opinions should be weighed, not counted.

A study done by Degroot shows that some individuals are highly skilled at organizing information- not actually reproducing the images they see. In his study, chess players were asked to reconstruct certain arrangements of pieces on a chessboard after looking at the arrangement for a brief period of time. It was found that the performance level of an expert chess player would drop to that of a novice when the pieces were arranged in a way that would never actually occur in a game. The initially high performance level of the experts was not due to eidetic imagery; they were simply able to better organize and therefore remember the information because the arrangements could be associated with pre-existing knowledge of chess.

Pasted from "Who has eidetic memory?"

If you are "smart", you will probably have an advantage in everything you do, but you won't automatically be "good at chess". I think it's clear that, except at the very highest levels, hard work is more important than how smart you are. It probably takes a singularly gifted mind to become Kasparov, but most grandmasters get to where they are through hard work (not to say that Kasparov didn't work hard).

The thing is, skills in one area don't necessarily transfer over to another area. Back in college when I was majoring in math people would often say to me, "Wow, you're really smart to be majoring in math, you must be awesome at chess!" Of course, that never made sense to me. If chess was all about solving equations and proving theorems, then, yes, I would probably be very good at chess. But, what does one thing have to do with another?

Yes, maybe logical reasoning is important, maybe spatial visualization is important, etc. but that's not how you become good at chess. You become good at chess by learning chess, not vague concepts related to chess.

I bet chess players being smart is akin to basketball players being tall. Being tall helps, but what really matters is skill, which is only built up through hard work and practice.

One of the most important parts of this question is the equal sign. Yet, we all take it to me does having a high I.Q. mean you will have a high rating. We must remember that for an equation to be valid both parts must be equal. Rephrasing this question, we could potentially come up with does having a high ELO correlate with having high intelligence? More importantly, does practicing the type of skills that make you an excellent chess player improve your IQ? I would argue to the respective represntatives of the world of chess that we are increasing our intelligence by playing chess. I am not alone, in fact, many districts have added in a curriculumn based on chess for the sole purpose of improving their  childrens cognitive abilities. If these things are true, that chess does indeed increase intelligence, than it just might be mandatory that all the best chess players have high I.Q. based on their perfect practice. So, gentlemen, what is it to be? The Chicken or the Egg?