Talent or hard work?

Elubas, I think you hit the key point: "a lot of things go into the making of a great chess player." It just seems to me that some things come easier for some people than for others. I remember my school days when I would have friends that could understand and excel in subjects that took me a lot more effort and I still was not able to reach their levels of expertise.

Again, hopefully I'm not being argumentative, just trying to add food for thought.

Again, the question is not if we are all equal or not, but rather, how important is it? Does it form a physical barrier if we are not a certain IQ by say, age 6?

Ever notice when being good at one thing helps you do something you have never done before? For example, if you grew up solving the Rubic's cube at a young age, even the first time you play chess, perhaps you will do better than the other kids starting out -- in a game like chess, you can never start out very good, but a good background can help. Believe it or not, I think playing chess has actually made me a tad bit better at tennis somehow, even though I didn't practice much (obviously, to improve a lot you need practice); it made me think about my shots a bit better! It makes me just a tad more logical when I play card games. It's all developed.

I think it can be surprising how our skills can develop in the background sometimes.

Talent is the natural consequence of hard work done in the right direction.

I would say a lot of the difference comes in what level of chess we are talking about.  We all know learning chess is not a linear thing - with a small amount of effort, patience and "talent" you can quickly become a "decent" chess player, but then it gets harder and harder to improve the further you go.  

At that point I think talent starts to become more important.  It is similar to creativity - that is not something you can easily pick up if you are not naturally creative and creativity in chess can be the difference the higher level you reach.  Once you are past the level of opponent where pawns and even the odd minor piece are given away quite regularly I would personally say that natural talent to create openings and the positional advantages needed to force the win will always be an advantage over hard work.  That's just my opinion though.

And obviously the more talent you have to compensate for someone else's hard work the more time you have compared to that other person to maybe learn other skills that will directly or indirectly improve your chess also.

Just as a minor addition to that - I play poker as well as chess and did decently well very quickly in poker.  Being a mathematician, I have some amount of natural talent for both and a logical brain.  My biggest problem common to both games is patience...I can play really carefully for most of a game and then bang, I play one stupid move too quickly or lose all my chips in a poker game after 3 hours of careful play.

I guess patience can be improved through hard work, but for me it puts a natural limiting factor on any talent levels I have because I just still keep on moving too fast even though I know I'm doing it!

Really many valuable advice here, thanks guys

Well, positional envision of that kind is a talent, for I am very sure that most people (including myself) could not master it even if they worked day and night on it for years.

themore u lpayer chess the more u train your brain in quick thinking so talent and hardwork is far from near