Lower-IQ Grandmasters?

Yes. As you can clearly see, I will never take the game seriously or be very good. My goal was to get my rating above my USCF rating, which I eventually did. I haven't played a single game here in months, maybe never again. I still play chess (without a clock) on game night though. Now my goal is to become a single digit handicap at golf. After that, I dont know, maybe visit every east coast state.

Going for GM is not necessarily a bad idea.  There are at least two smart kids in my club that is on the GM path. They are going to NTG (Norsk Toppidretsgymnas) and will pull trough that school in 4 years, while other pupils use 3 years getting a normal videregående skole. For the price of one year extra, they will get a chesstitle, usually IM  or FM, but Aryan Tari got GM at school.    It is ok to become IM, it is a certification that tells you have a competitive brain, and they also gets physically very fit.  

I dont think they will play chess for a living. Probably they go to university later.

They may be smart kids, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. Even smart people, especially kids, don't always make the best life decisions.

There may be more meaningful things in life, and there probably are. 

People, especially kids, are easily impressed and dazzled by certain things. Then they can set them as life goals. I just listened to a magician (Ryan Hayashi) who was very impressed as a boy with David Copperfield and Bruce Lee. So he spent years and years, a very substantial portion of his time in life, developing martial arts and magic skills, magic tricks. 

Tragic. 

The generic term might be "becoming something." And it seems that there is often not very much intelligent perspective involved, just a more or less blind impulse or motivation.

 

The idea that intelligence and chess success are unrelated is absurd. The idea that the entire spectrum of one's mental worth can be determined by whether they pick the right symbol on a Raven Matrix a few times is also absurd.

 

IQ has worth, but hard work has more. If you can't get your act together and work hard at what you are trying to master, mastery won't be achieved. Simple.

Intelligence and chess success are related only insofar as greater intelligence will improve your capability in pretty much anything...i.e. no special correlation.  IQ, meanwhile, is a mediocre measure of intelligence, at best.  IQ and chess skill direct correlation?  Not really any leg to stand on.  

And someone might tell you that there are much better things you could do in your life than play golf or travel. See? This whole idea that someone could put value on other persons life choices, passions and hobbies (as long as they are not hurting anyone else) is ridiculous.

If you never get to the real heart of it, I'm not so sure you haven't missed something that is worth not missing. 

Love your insistence on data and facts!  Thank you.

But playing devils advocate, I think what dpnorman might be saying is that chess expertise shows a certain type of intelligence that is not measured by the typical methods of intelligence measuring?  

The point, if it requires explanation, is that no idiot is going to become world champion. More critically, what do you know about the professions of those "control groups" you mentioned? What were the average IQs of those groups? Your list of studies gives quantity of data, but there's not enough explanation given. 

Of the studies you cited, none of them seem to address what to many people should be the main question, which is whether higher intelligence, however defined, will produce better results all else being equal in those trying to get better at chess. This to me is axiomatic. 

Please try to remain civil during these conversations. It really shouldn't be too much to ask, especially seeing as this seems to be the only thing you do all day. 

What do other FIDE certified senior trainers and GMs have to say on the subject? 

Intelligence unfortunately can be overwhelmed by memory and programming, and it's only getting worse.

At least in this field. 

Why cant idiots skateboard?

The idea that hard work will be enough is a dangerous idea. It puts people in a strange position. One guy who fell for it worked like a dog for years with trainers who held out that promise to him. He couldn't get past a certain ceiling, despite all their claims, and finally became skeptical and quit banging his head against the wall. He accepted where he was and moved on to other things. 

False hope can be very cruel. 

I was being serious when I complimented you on sticking to facts and data, yet you seemed to take it wrong.  Also, I haven't rejected anyone or anything, I am just having a conversation.  

I did quickly read your post, but I didn't see much info about the ways that intelligence was measured.  However it was done, I fully believe the results that whatever intelligence tests were used did not correlate with chess skill.  

What if you forget about the word intelligence, and talk about chess "aptitude"?  Obviously, guys like Carlsen and Karjakin who were GMs at age 13 have an aptitude for finding the best moves in chess.  You can't attribute their success as 13 year old kids solely to hard work.  Obviously lots of people have worked longer than they were even alive at that point, and never got close to having that level of skill.

You must not be a very good skateboarder 

I don't agree that there's a parallel between something purely athletic and something purely mental. I wouldn't be surprised if some idiot mastered skateboarding, just as idiots have mastered other athletic events.

My question remains. What evidence is there that with equal time and work put in and other important variables controlled for, a person of higher intelligence would not gradually surpass one of average intelligence?

Your studies leave out all sorts of necessary context. If it had stated that the average IQ of a master group was 100, then maybe you would have proven something. But instead it just tends to state that they don't have a higher intelligence than that of the control group without saying where that group comes from or what scores they got. Similarly, with the children, no effort is made to control for time spent studying or type of study. These studies do not provide adequate context for their conclusions to be very valuable unless you are withholding information about the studies themselves.

Intelligence can help a player have higher potential, but it doesn’t define their limits. There is plenty of other factors besides intellect that comes into play.

There are different types of intelligence.  I knew a girl once who was not smart.  Trust me on this, I'm not getting into the reasons right now.  She was also not educated.  But one day we had this word scramble game in front of us.  It was a difficult game for me, but she almost instantly would look at this jumble of letters and figure out what word it was.  She was laughing at me, thinking I wasn't seriously trying, but I was!  Her brain worked differently than mine, and had an advantage over me in that specific situation.  Her skill in word scramble was an indication of 1 thing - that she was good at word scramble.  Although it may not correlate with skills in other areas, you could still consider it a type of specialized intelligence.  Same with chess.