What's is Magnus Carlsen's IQ?

He'd have a lot of time on his hands. 

it's been proven that iq isn't related to chess skill. child prodigies will have higher iqs, but not extrordinary, only about 120. my iq is higher than that and my ELO rating is 800 and dropping

M. Carlsen I.Q. level, same as the mildew growing in your bathroom wall.

Carlsen looks like a thoughtful guy, but then again, all Norwegians are like that due to the lack of sunlight during winter months...  Darkness makes you moody, and moodinessis associated with intelligence, for some reason...

Similarly, happy go-lucky-people are generally regarded as "not-too-bright".

I don't care - it has no relevance to chess ability.

Both Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov ( the greatest players ever ) say that an ability to play chess is nothing more than an ability to play chess.

 Garry Kasparov have many coaches, mentors while Fischer had not. 

Intelligence is too broad a concept to be meaningful without qualification. You can only look at achievements and actions to judge particular skill and aptitude for a given task (e.g. chess), in my opinion. Just as Wittgenstein refuted the private language argument, it is not meaningful to talk of intelligence that remains 'in the box', undemonstrated.

who cares...there's no correlation between general intelligence (IQ) and chess.there seems to be a correlation between memory and chess ability though.

Is that an example of you appreciating a different opinion to your own?

dude....Kasparov only has like a 135 IQ.even I have a higher one than that.

I think you mean impossible...

Another IQ thread, hooray ...

From an educational standpoint, intelligence is now seen as a complex mix rather than a single construct. See Howard Gardner's work on Multiple Intelligences. There are now about 8-9 recognized kinds of intelligence, including musical, natural, logical-mathematical, social, spatial, linguistic, kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and existential. Top chess players would rate high on the logical-mathematical and (I'm guessing) possibly spatial intelligence scales.

From another angle, you would want to look at high order thinking skills and lower order thinking skills. Damian Nash (Utah state champ - I'm not sure if that is current or not) has done some excellent thinking on this.

Social interaction requires navigating far more variables and dynamics than any board game ever invented.  It's a game all of us have played our entire lives, and yet still greater than nine out of ten people consider themselves inadequate at it.  It's not, strictly speaking, a zero sum game.  So it's hard to determine winners and losers...yet the stakes are extremely high, and the pitfalls dangerous.

Have you ever been to a high-level tournament and had any chance to interact with super GM's?  Of the twenty or thirty I've had a chance to share a moment or two with in my life, maybe two weren't total social morons.

Guys like Carlsen and Kramnik aren't geniuses.  They're specialized tools.  While most of us were learning what it is to be human, they were learning how to better move plastic pieces around a game grid.  They...like everyone who really succeeds at such endeavors...channeled their developmental energies unidirectionally.  It makes them really, really good at one particular thing.  It doesn't make them geniuses.  It has little if anything to do with, as you say, "raw cognitive power."  It has to do with having recognized and become familiar with the critical positions of the Ruy or the Catalan from the time you were four.

You want a genius in chess?  Show me the guy who became the most popular guy in high school, politicked his way to positions of influence and opportunity all through college, started a successful business or ten after school, and then became a super GM after he picked up the game in adulthood.

Failing that, these guys are just monomaniacal robots with nothing else on their plate.

Becoming world-class great at any one thing isn't a function of brilliance.  It's a function of focusing on that one thing to the exclusion of everything else for a long, long time.

You want evidence of a genius who also played great chess?  Capablanca.  Guy could hardly be bothered with the game.  Just showed up occasionally and was the best in the world at it.

I had to lol with your use of IMHO!!!

Cognition involves more than one part of the brain. I don't want to diminish the abilities of GMs and all of the analytical and logical skills needed for quality chess. But understanding all the other uses of your grey matter is not a 'lefty liberal' conspiracy - a lot of good research has gone into trying to understand the whole brain.

To summarize Nash (an excellent chess player who does rate well on interpersonal intelligence ...), about the first year of learning chess is spent developing higher order thinking skills (analysis, evaluation, creating), with a lot of pattern recognition development (which often is realized as 'intuition'). But after that, a huge amount of time is poured into memorizing databases and openings, etc. Memorization is a lower order thinking skill - still important, but not what makes someone a genius. Genius would be knowing how to use all that memorized knowledge creatively.

I understand from your posts that your view of what comprises intelligence is extremely narrow.

To answer your question about the hypothetical 90 IQ guy, I'd say the answer depends quite heavily on how you measured that number.

By most metrics, probably not, if only because the upper reaches are going to be peppered with men who have somewhat higher cognitive abilities who ALSO spent their lives doing nothing but playing chess.

By the most evolved intelligence metrics, however, the 90 IQ is a lot more likely to become world chess champion than anyone with an IQ of say, 140 or greater.  Because a person with such a high level of intelligence would be far too highly evolved socially to dedicate the necessary portion of his all-too-limited lifespan to such a trivial pursuit.  When you take a more advanced psychological view of things in this way, the man of slightly-above-average intelligence is far and away the most likely to rise to "world class" in a comparitively low-reward endeavor such as chess.

The exceptions are, of course, borderline autistics who take a fancy to chess, like Fischer.  Such a person can have godlike powers of comprehension, analysis, and recognition, but still be able to focus solely upon a life of trivia with no sense of loss.

Magnus Carlsen does not have a team of grandmasters working for him! I don't have the full details of his team, but beyond the aid of a GM-strenght second (and his dad, who takes care of the practical arrangements), I think he's more or less on his own when playing tournaments. I recommend you read the book Wonderboy by GM Simen Agdestein, if you want facts instead of conjecture.

@ciljettu - No, your concept of intelligence is akin to confusing the tail for the elephant. (Well, you were the one to reference anatomy...)

I grew up near equator, there's only 2 seasons (either sunny or look for Noah's Ark -- just non-stop rain). Thus, exposure to sunlight can't be correlated to lack of intelligence. Color or race, maybe due to pigmentation.

As to M. Carlsen's I.Q., whatever it is, let 'em be ---- as the young minds appear in pure genetic wisdom !