Relationship between Chess rating and I.Q?

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As usual, reading the original post and skipping to the end, although with a thread 42 pages long so far I'm sure the horse is long dead

There is enough overlap with IQ and chess success to make it a factor, but chess skill, especially these days, depends on memory a lot more than intelligence, and they are different things.

I can speak from the far end of this.  My memory is simply terrible, and to give you an idea, I can watch hours on an opening and can't remember anything beyond the first move or two.  I do remember the first 2 or 3 moves of some openings, the ones I play like the Ruy Lopez, Sicilian, and the French.

I also have absolutely no visualization skills, or no visual memory for that matter since you need to visualize to use visual memory lol, so playing chess is a challenge for me even though my IQ has been measured at 164, which by the way would have been higher had there not been questions requiring visualization on the thing, rotating items in your head and such, which I simply cannot do   We could say this is a form of intelligence though, so I'm not so well rounded perhaps, although I do fine with the non-visual stuff.

These challenges have managed to discourage me from ever taking up the game seriously, until now that is.  I'm throwing myself passionately into the game now, and having a blast so far.  I'll never be much good but it's fun to see how well I can compensate for these defects.

So IQ certainly can help, and can definitely be a hindrance if it's below average, but I'd rank this as a distant third to memory and visualization skills.  The most important thing to realize is that you don't need a high IQ to be a master of the game or even grandmaster.  We need to use the talents we have, and while they vary among players, for the most part these elements are determined by what God gave us, and our task is then to try to make the most of them,

When was the OP last online? Oh 3 years ago.

I would say there is a better correlation between chess puzzle rating and IQ.

Like in IQ tests questions, you know chess puzzles have a solution. Chess is way too complex to compare it to IQ tests: the outcome could change in a heartbeat for many different reasons: you have natural tendancy to blunder, you overlook, you play too fast, you do not have a strong defensive aspect in tour game,  you never study the chess game, etc...

There is an important aspect in intelligence that IQ test do not measure: ADAPTATION.

Indeed, in order to improve at chess, you must adapt by finding what could be done to get better,and implement it. I would say adaptation is more important than your IQ since one could theoretically reach 2000 rating with an average IQ of 100. Those people who get to this level must have an adaptation faculty very well developed: they take lessons, they review every game they play and find why they lost, they study openings, middle and endgames, etc... Most of us dream of having this rating!

I would also say that JUDGEMENT is another important aspect of intelligence (not really measured in IQ tests) that is required in order to improve at chess. Judgement is linked to making the right decisions: for instance you find a good move, but you explore further to see if a better move could be found, and finally you make the correct decision based on your judgement. Other example: you find a great move that attacks opponent, but you also notice that opponent's next correct move would lead to a checkmate. So, your judgement tells you to play a defensive move that would remove the checkmate threat.

I would also say that there are other aspects which rely more on traits of persomality that are absolutely paramount in improvement at chess: PERSEVERANCE, AMBITION, PASSION, GOOD LIFESTYLE HABITS, etc. Do they belong to intelligence? I would say not directly, buy that they give you a tremendous edge.

The real mental test is a Rorschach ink blot test. What can you see other than squashed insects?

Lets settle this once and for all.  Bobby Fischer had a genius IQ when it came to chess.  I heard Yasser Seirawan say that Bobby had a very thick book with all of Spaasky's games in it that he had memorized.  He would get free meals at restaurants by letting people challenge him to replay any game they wished to pick out by memory.  Bobby was outplaying Spassky so convincingly, that the Soviet authorities had Fischer’s chair X-Rayed before game 18 because Spassly thought he felt strange vibrations coming from his chair, which he thought was a setup to distract him.  He dropped out of school at sixteen years of age and learned Russian so he could study from Russian chess magazines in preparing for games aginst them.  He never played for draws and proved it when winning 20 games in a row against world class players with no draws in his march to the world title.  He was farther above all his peers than Carlsen has ever been.  He was a genius when it came to chess.  

With that said, he had no social skills other than offending just about everybody and was a self-hating Jew.  I don't know what relationship that has with an actual IQ test but obviously he had great mental powers beyond the average human being.  

In contrast, Kasparov showed he could function outside the chess world after his retirement and seems pretty normal.  It will  be interesting to see how Carlsen who also has a genius chess IQ functions in the next few years after giving up his title.  The difference I believe is Bobby was mentally ill but came along at the right time in history to show the world what is possible if someone is dedicated to one thing at the exclusion of everything else.

I took one in a counseling session, too. The quantity of my responses invalidated the test.

Thanks. I've wondered.

Well I was tested back in the 70s with one of only two actual IQ tests administered in elementary schools in the US. Both tests had a top score of 146 and that was my score. And it didn't reflect at all on future performance. Certainly not in regards chess. But then it's so common to run across players with high ratings and an embarrassing lack of writing ability.

And yet to be a chess player at all speaks to any person's intelligence. To be here in the first place.

     There is zero evidence of any cause/effect link (high IQ necessary for top chess performance) between IQ and chess ability. Should all chess players with high IQs step forward and reveal their elo ratings I'm sure they would run the gamut from total patzers to top-level GMs in roughly the same % as above average, average, and below average IQs. And should all GMs and IMs take IQ tests we can expect their scores to run the same gamut as the population as a whole.

     Higher-IQ players will have a slight advantage as their ability to learn rapidly will make study easier, and low-IQ people are less likely to indulge in activities of an intellectual nature. The general public sees chess as a game for eggheads so many people have the mistaken idea that only the greatest intellects can succeed at it.

     I have seen professors at UC Berkeley become immersed in the game, play regularly for a few years, and never rise above Class B (1600-1800) elo. This includes mathematicians who produced work that could be understood by fewer humans than worldwide than there are GMs in the world. I took IQ tests when I was young, scored 168, and reached a top elo rating of around 2100. Hardly genius-level chess play.

In general IQ shows one thing: the skill to solve IQ-tests. Nothing else.

I certainly have only my parents as a source, and I've been told again and again that they didn't say that to give me some kind of boost. They just repeated something to me that they were told not to. But my gf all throughout college got her PhD as a clinical psychologist, and backed up the thing about 146. As well as letting me know how pointless they were, and that my IQ had probably dropped since then. Which I'm sure is true. But in the end it just didn't correlate at all. A test for ADHD would have, but oh well. I almost never bring it up, because I'm so shockingly not a genius, but technically anything above 135 on that test scored in the genius range. It's just a test you give kids. The main takeaway, really, is just that any other test is going to be "unofficial", despite the two official tests also having no real value.

The skill to solve a type of puzzle (say, sudoku or crossword or chess or whatever) is a skill of its own. Intelligence is a poor substitute of knowing the tricks.

An average chess player with an average IQ will be MUCH better at solving chess puzzles than a beginner chess player with an extremely high IQ. No contest there.

You're probably right in general, man, but I just want to point out that in this context "average" equates to a mid-level Elo and "beginner" equates to a low Elo. Of course the former would be better at chess.

It is *so* not worth going down that rabbit hole. Trust me on that one.

It's a cursed conversation. One of the most liberating times for me in recent years was realizing the extent to which I was engaging in Dunning-Kruger-style thinking. It's an absolute relief.

My Iq is 115 according to some online test and I reached 2071 FIDE

It isn't what I mean. I always think of Dunning-Kruger in terms of the game Civilization, where any part of the world you haven't explored is a dark square. You have to actually walk on to it to reveal its contents. I guess Fog of War is the same concept. We all have a tendency, I think, to underestimate the vastness of that field of dark squares. Regardless of intelligence. Elon, just the other day, was acting too good for chess, saying it was too simple for him. Now that guy probably has a genius mind but nonetheless he's providing an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. He's acting about the same as the YouTube vlogger who gave himself a week to learn chess and beat a GM, only to realize a few days later that it was impossible. The dark squares are everywhere. Any time we see an amazing film and decide it's the greatest movie ever made, it's not like we've run through the other ten thousand classics just to make sure. But no, I've never wanted to be an edgelord.

I had the same experience with Civ3 that you did. I reinstalled 2 and just kept going with that. There is actually FreeCiv somewhere, or there used to be, but by that time I wasn't into it.

My two ideas for video games are both extremely minimalistic. One is a dungeon crawl where you abstract out all the story elements and just keep the math. Not because that sort of thing is my wheelhouse, but because the abstraction of it is so much simpler but it *almost* works the same. You could call it Battle Stats. It would pass the time and push all the dopamine triggers, but it doesn't clutter up your thoughts or distract you, as it's only a series of shifting number groups. The other game would be an abstracted version of Candy Crush Saga with nothing but different-colored squares. That's another game that stimulates feel-good chemicals. But if you're trying to get through a train trip or something, it could absorb an hour of your time and not make a dent in your train of thought. The best part is that they could be free and on the web, since a video game that's either just numbers or just plain colors couldn't require big server costs.

Video games never did become my thing, so I never got into Castle Wolfenstein. I kept looking for quieter and quieter games with simpler and simpler interfaces. Ah. There *was* a third idea for a game. Sunday Driver. Essentially a driving simulator that uses actual Google street views as a reference to give you an open-ended game where all you do is drive in the actual world. As a side benefit you could learn your way around anywhere. This was something that happened at the University of Michigan, where they had a MUD that used the U of M campus as its map.

I spent about fifteen years trying to teach myself coding from PDFs, but it never worked. My need to "do" overpowers the facility to learn, so it's all about busy work. I've been running a free eBook site on my own for twenty years called Bookstacks, although it's usually dormant.