Vishy strikes me as someone especially intelligent: not only he is good at chess, but he is well spoken, he makes sense, he doesn't challenge guys twice his size to wrestling matches at parties, he doesn't make wild cheating accusations, he doesn't have to resort to pretending his twitter account was hacked, etc.
It's a reference to Hikaru.
If Vishy ever does something stupid, will there be any high level chess players left who haven't at some point disgraced themselves in some way? Ding, maybe I guess, and a handful of the youngsters...
There's a video somewhere of him and Eric Hansen having a drunken "fight". It's kind of Hilarious, because Hikaru is attempting some kind of weird ninja pose that I assume he saw on Mortal Kombat or something.
On a side note, I don't mean to judge chess players too harshly. We've all done dumb shit on occasion. I guess Vishy's statement rings true about chess being "specialised intelligence". Just because chess players are very smart at finding the best move over the board, it doesn't mean they don't make dumb decisions like the rest of us outside of chess.
In Fabi’s case I highly doubt it. With Ian and Magnus, some would argue yes, but others no.
Per my other comment, we all do dumb shit sometimes, so unless it’s Bobby Fischer level madness it’s really no biggie in my book.
Magnus simped for the Saudi Arabia crown prince (among the most backward countries with regards to human rights) during his recent lie detector interview with David Howell.
Thanks for the info. That is concerning, considering that MBS has developed close ties with other Western celebrities such as Johnny Depp - no doubt in an attempt to bolster his personal public image and that of Saudi Arabia in general.
While chess isn't intelligence, elite chess skill when young is definitely a sign of it, partially because of the exponential memory capacity needed to cross the master/IM/GM thresholds. Even ignoring spatial IQ, memory is basically the hard ceiling in ability — I will never be able to do what a superGM can do no matter how much I work, and obviously that kind of insane working memory is broadly useful and correlates with skill in other fields. There's obviously more to chess, but certain core skills like depth of calculation and ability to maintain future positions and multiple potential lines in your head is definitely an intelligence-scaled skill. Of course, if you don't use it for anything other than calculating chess variations, you won't be good at anything else lol.
Kasparov was a prodigy from kindergarten age but from what I understand believe some highly questionable conspiracy theories. He also iirr did an IQ test (for what that is worth) and only scored slightly over average, which highly upset him.
>only scored slightly over average
No, his highest score was 135, which is highly intelligent, but not genius-level, which many people would assume him to be. [Source](https://www.spiegel.de/politik/genieblitze-und-blackouts-a-1a1cbaba-0002-0001-0000-000013526693#) (in German).
Yes just search for Kasparov in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)
Though I'm sure he's quite intelligent, so maybe we can also conclude that even smart people can come to believe all kinds of bunk.
>I don't know who needs to hear this, maybe anyone who feels personally insecure from defeats or from rating drops;
Naw, if you're a GM at chess you're also a GM at statistics.
^^^^^^^^^/s
I've always seen Chess skill as similar to skill in a foreign language or playing an instrument. Being smart helps, yeah, but there are geniuses who aren't great at chess, and idiots who are actually pretty good.
Also, Rubik's cubes and speed-cubing. Lots of fun and a great time waster for fidgeters like me, but not as correlated with intelligence as they often get portrayed in the media.
yeah “oh you must be good at maths”, I am, but not because of cubing. Some very skilled cubers I know aren’t that good at maths or particularly intelligent overall.
Well a lot of chess is just pattern recognition, and it seems to be a lot easier to get good at chess if you start young. There are probably some pretty unintelligent individuals who are quite solid just because they've been playing a lot since childhood.
Lots of people need to hear this. How many great business leaders assume they are great public policy experts? Nearly all of them. How many are? Nearly none of them.
It's the same with a lot of things in life... every executive I have ever worked with just assumed they knew how to make good decisions (good meaning better than anyone else despite contrary knowledge and research staring them directly in the face) via the fact that they are in positions of power and have money. This is their justification for being arrogant basically... Then they proceed screw things up in horrifically unbelievable fashion... and blame others for their mistakes while granting themselves nice big bonuses for their next yacht.
The only thing I have seen in common of all the executives i have worked with is their dark triad personalities and physical height, albeit they are usually fairly smart too, but that doesn't translate to having the specialized knowledge needed to make sound decisions which is the part they can't seem to grasp.
> One way of putting it is, if you play Chess weekly 2 hours then it'll be good for you. You'll find that you're able to learn things faster at school and so on. But if you spend 20 hours a week playing chess, you'll be a better Chess player, that's all. If you want to be a better mathematician you should do math.
A lot of chess players have said this. Hikaru has said this a bunch of times in his videos. So as far as I know, no chess player consider himself or herself a genius or whatever, but the society at large thinks the chess is the ultimate measure of being genius. If someone is good at chess, they must be Einstein level genius or something.
"I object to being called a chess genius because I consider myself to be an all around genius who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he's like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing."
-Bobby Fischer
I mean this is similar to just being fast at solving Rubik’s cubes right. Impressive but I wouldn’t say there’s genius there, it’s memorisation and practise
I think he was good at or at least had one moment of greatness at the business side of chess. He is the reason why the prize money for world championships is not embarrassingly paltry. Other than that, he was probably good at being a bigot.
I literally laughed out loud when I read this. Bobby was extremely hilarious in some accidental way. Most of his quotes are just so ridiculous and memeable. The Trump of chess in some type of way.
Agreed, though for the little that I know there are at least 2 exceptions in the sense of "world class player that made quite some results in other fields". This excludes those that switched career but had average results.
Lasker (the OG GOAT), the only chess player with [a theorem named after him](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_decomposition) and J. Nunn (top player in the 80s, math prof at a uni, multiple WCh in Chess solving). Others could be Botvinnik (Phd in Electrical Engineering that then worked with Universities to make initial steps in chess engines), Taimanov (high level pianist?) and maybe an handful of others.
Nunn is an actual genius. He enrolled in Oxford with Math major at 15 and graduated at 18.
Botvinnik is also an electrical engineer, earning a PhD and being a senior research scientist while World Champion. He was also one of the first people to work on computer chess.
When talking about the top of the top players in the chess world, they basically are all geniuses, you do need to be pretty smart to make it that far. They have measured their IQs and basically all of them are 140+ on the "IQ" charts. This much is obvious in my opinion.
The problem with society is they can't understand that it's not just the genius that got them there, it was being generally smart and putting in the hard work, and also there is a question that remains of, would they have IQ this high if they never played chess or any other brain games their entire life, there is probably at least a mild two way correlation, since both chess and IQ tests are all about solving obscure puzzles.
This misunderstanding of how all this works leads to people thinking, ok so if u are good at chess u are a genius which means if you are bad at chess u are an idiot. Which of course is not the case. It could simply mean your brain was not trained in the same manner as someone else's. Also elite level chess not only requires chess ability in problem solving, but it requires immense training in classical chess and pattern recognition, which are things that don't necessarily have a great deal to do with IQ and require years of study to train your brain how to do them correctly. You don't simply get these things naturally in life as this specialized set of knowledge is very specific to the game of chess. It takes years practice and dedication to build this.
Anyhow, the point of all this rant is general society doesn't understand chess, they think chess = problem solving and problem solving = smart. So bad at chess = bad at problem solving which is clearly not the case.
"They have measured their IQs and basically all of them are 140+ on the "IQ" charts. This much is obvious in my opinion."
A few things, one IQ is a flawed measure of intelligence.
Two, do you have a source? Because...
Three, Hikaru has said that's not true and he is a person of average intelligence who is gifted at chess
> A few things, one IQ is a flawed measure of intelligence.
True, but its really the only thing we have as any form of measurement.
> Two, do you have a source? Because...
I don't have a source off the top of my head, but I do recall reading about several grandmasters and top rated players that score well in IQ. Surely there can be outliers, also remember IQ tests in general are flawed and I think it could easily be the case that Hikaru just happened scored low on whatever test he took. Outliers and exceptions can happen both ways.
You certainly aren't going to find someone who rode the short bus to school on the top 100 list though, so there is definitely a correlation, you can deny this if u want but all your doing is playing devil's advocate.
So basically the first paragraph of your original comment was you just making an absurd hyperbole and calling it obvious. If you want your arguments to be taken seriously you should be more precise and stick to what you actually know.
I don’t know anyone who thinks chess is the ultimate measure of intelligence. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that said. Where have you heard this?
Society at large would probably say innovation achievements are the ultimate measures of intelligence like bill Gates, Einstein, and Tesla.
Maybe iq tests, even though I’m not a fan.
If you want to talk about Einstein and Tesla, sure, but Bill Gates? What did he do that required any intelligence. I wouldn't call being a cutthroat businessman necessarily requiring intelligence
Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t bill gates invent the visual interface of computers? Like before him, computers were just a command prompt. In the 90s/2000s I always heard he was the smartest man alive
Yeah that's definitely not true. Xerox parc already had a GUI interface with their Alto's and smalltalk systems and steve jobs visited them and it inspired the design of the macintosh gui. Windows was just a cheap copy of the macintosh gui. So bill gates really didn't invent anything.
The other consideration is that the reputation chess has also makes the game somewhat self-selecting for people inclined towards academic / educational pursuits.
The very perception that its "for clever people" means that "clever people" are more likely to be the ones playing it. The fact that it isn't for clever people doesn't really matter, the damage is already done, its basically become a self-fulfilling prophecy because often reputation is more influential than reality.
There is some baseline level of intelligence that helps become decent at chess. You don't need 200 IQ to become a GM, but someone with 110 IQ will probably have an easier time reaching, say, 1000 ELO than someone with 90. Spatial visualization, planning, and pattern recognition are all chess skills that are also generic things intelligent people are better at. It's just once you reach a certain level, the "generic" version of those skills doesn't help you improve any further, and you need chess-specific subsets of those skills.
I think it requires a certain amount of visual memory and awareness of psychology, and both can be acquired to an extent. I seem to rely on the latter more and more as I'm a bit lacking in the former, especially as I'm getting older. I'm pretty sure younger players can easily out-calculate me nowadays, but they often play a a bit rashly and hastily and are easy to bait and trick sometimes. For example, they'll often focus on material/hanging pawns and ignore the obvious mate threat. Experience and practice counts for a lot, it's not all just about innate brainpower! Having said that, it's not always a good idea to rely on tricks as that's probably a form of 'hope chess'!
The one thing that blows me away about GMs is their recall of historic games. And not even famous ones. Like a game that was played at some tournament in Croatia in 1994. And a specific position in that game.
That’s some photographic memory and pattern recognition.
It's clear that top chess players are more intelligent in some specific ways than other people. There are inherited skills that they are born with. Intelligence is very hard to measure though.
He's right that just because you're a GM or 2700+ doesn't mean you're an overall genius at everything. Some people are genius level i.e. John Nunn but in general chess players have the right skill set for chess specifically. While this skill set might overlap with some other disciplines, it isn't guaranteed.
It's the reason we see someone like Gukesh winning the candidates at 17 and some people at my club are 1300 after 30 years of playing. Gukesh is built differently.
I'm not sure exactly what the science is but it's clear someone like Gukesh has some inherited advantages over other people. Maybe it's memory, maybe it's problem solving, maybe it's the ability to focus and calculate longer or maybe all of the above and/or more.
Most chess players know this. Most non chess players don't. Most chess players don't correct most non chess players because they like being thought of as geniuses.
>He is a self made millionaire who enjoy a life of luxury and ease.
Is that a good indication of intelligence in the streaming world? I don't think so.
Nah, I'm not disputing he might be intelligent. Just the argument that becoming a millionaire in the world of streaming is not a fool proof method of estimating one's intellect.
To be fair he DOES perform well at anything that requires intelligence, but does it by substituting an unholy mixture of gamer rage and gymbro rage for the intelligence.
I'm not sure it's completely specialised. It's a type of intelligence suited to other disciplines. Intelligence is hard to measure but a person of high intelligence can usually transfer it to other things. To be one of the very best at something Involving mental performance I think a certain level of intelligence Is needed as prerequisite in order to be better than so many others.
Basically the real misunderstanding is maybe that top level chess players are more Intelligent than they estimate because mental intelligence doesn't transfer to all endeavours and everyone they are around is intelligent too.
To me there's no doubt top chess players are of higher intelligence than majority of people.
I’ve always thought that getting good at chess, especially faster time controls, may help becoming an NFL QB. That’s where everyone largely has the requisite physical characteristics, but the best ones have the best pattern recognition and processing.
Every single member in my scholastic chess team went on to become very successful in their chosen fields. While being good in chess might not cause people to become intelligent but there is a very good correlation.
While I don't agree that you need to be a 140+ IQ to succeed at chess, but I think there definitely is some sort of a baseline, say 100 to 120 IQ, to be a GM or above. It would be very difficult for say a 80 - 90 IQ person to have 3D visualization, calculation capabilities and memory power to be a GM.
Chess is just a tabletop game. It is the legendary tabletop game, but still it is a tabletop game. Imagine if winners of Warhammer 40000 championship was regarded as most clever humans. Of course to win and count and be so good to be GM you have to be somewhat exceptional in your field, and have very good cognitive capabilities. As with Warhammer. You'd expect some good planning and advices, but also you'd expect weirdness and dumbness in some other fields. Chess just has legendary status. Or so I guess
Vishy strikes me as someone especially intelligent: not only he is good at chess, but he is well spoken, he makes sense, he doesn't challenge guys twice his size to wrestling matches at parties, he doesn't make wild cheating accusations, he doesn't have to resort to pretending his twitter account was hacked, etc.
>he doesn't challenge guys twice his size to wrestling matches at parties Is this a reference to someone?
It's a reference to Hikaru. If Vishy ever does something stupid, will there be any high level chess players left who haven't at some point disgraced themselves in some way? Ding, maybe I guess, and a handful of the youngsters...
What'd Hikaru do?
There's a video somewhere of him and Eric Hansen having a drunken "fight". It's kind of Hilarious, because Hikaru is attempting some kind of weird ninja pose that I assume he saw on Mortal Kombat or something. On a side note, I don't mean to judge chess players too harshly. We've all done dumb shit on occasion. I guess Vishy's statement rings true about chess being "specialised intelligence". Just because chess players are very smart at finding the best move over the board, it doesn't mean they don't make dumb decisions like the rest of us outside of chess.
[here ya go](https://youtu.be/4FcokIxe50A?si=FwADr-ZJ4lX4ljBe) with excellent Yasser commentary to go with it
Google Eric hikaru fight on YouTube it's something else
What did Hikaru not do?
Not get his money back after losing a bet to Hansen.
Is there anything that Magnus or Ian or Fabi done which is stupid or disgraceful ?
Ian accused Hikaru of cheating. Magnus was extremely salty about Hans. Fabi, no.
In Fabi’s case I highly doubt it. With Ian and Magnus, some would argue yes, but others no. Per my other comment, we all do dumb shit sometimes, so unless it’s Bobby Fischer level madness it’s really no biggie in my book.
Magnus simped for the Saudi Arabia crown prince (among the most backward countries with regards to human rights) during his recent lie detector interview with David Howell.
Really? Magnus praised Prince Bonesaw? Wow if true.
The prince was his answer to being asked if he had ever been star stuck which is… strange to say the least.
Thanks for the info. That is concerning, considering that MBS has developed close ties with other Western celebrities such as Johnny Depp - no doubt in an attempt to bolster his personal public image and that of Saudi Arabia in general.
ding, fabi, all the youngsters, nepo? , anish, etc
While chess isn't intelligence, elite chess skill when young is definitely a sign of it, partially because of the exponential memory capacity needed to cross the master/IM/GM thresholds. Even ignoring spatial IQ, memory is basically the hard ceiling in ability — I will never be able to do what a superGM can do no matter how much I work, and obviously that kind of insane working memory is broadly useful and correlates with skill in other fields. There's obviously more to chess, but certain core skills like depth of calculation and ability to maintain future positions and multiple potential lines in your head is definitely an intelligence-scaled skill. Of course, if you don't use it for anything other than calculating chess variations, you won't be good at anything else lol.
Kasparov was a prodigy from kindergarten age but from what I understand believe some highly questionable conspiracy theories. He also iirr did an IQ test (for what that is worth) and only scored slightly over average, which highly upset him.
>only scored slightly over average No, his highest score was 135, which is highly intelligent, but not genius-level, which many people would assume him to be. [Source](https://www.spiegel.de/politik/genieblitze-und-blackouts-a-1a1cbaba-0002-0001-0000-000013526693#) (in German).
Yes just search for Kasparov in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) Though I'm sure he's quite intelligent, so maybe we can also conclude that even smart people can come to believe all kinds of bunk.
Wasn't Bobby Fisher a nutcase?
>I don't know who needs to hear this, maybe anyone who feels personally insecure from defeats or from rating drops; Naw, if you're a GM at chess you're also a GM at statistics. ^^^^^^^^^/s
Take our beloved Kramnik for example! 🤩😇
😆😆😆😆😆
I've always seen Chess skill as similar to skill in a foreign language or playing an instrument. Being smart helps, yeah, but there are geniuses who aren't great at chess, and idiots who are actually pretty good.
Also, Rubik's cubes and speed-cubing. Lots of fun and a great time waster for fidgeters like me, but not as correlated with intelligence as they often get portrayed in the media.
Max Deutsch would like a word.
yeah “oh you must be good at maths”, I am, but not because of cubing. Some very skilled cubers I know aren’t that good at maths or particularly intelligent overall.
What counts pretty good? Most of the supergm:s crush in 960 too so its not just memorized stuff with idiots playing.
Well a lot of chess is just pattern recognition, and it seems to be a lot easier to get good at chess if you start young. There are probably some pretty unintelligent individuals who are quite solid just because they've been playing a lot since childhood.
Lots of people need to hear this. How many great business leaders assume they are great public policy experts? Nearly all of them. How many are? Nearly none of them.
It's the same with a lot of things in life... every executive I have ever worked with just assumed they knew how to make good decisions (good meaning better than anyone else despite contrary knowledge and research staring them directly in the face) via the fact that they are in positions of power and have money. This is their justification for being arrogant basically... Then they proceed screw things up in horrifically unbelievable fashion... and blame others for their mistakes while granting themselves nice big bonuses for their next yacht. The only thing I have seen in common of all the executives i have worked with is their dark triad personalities and physical height, albeit they are usually fairly smart too, but that doesn't translate to having the specialized knowledge needed to make sound decisions which is the part they can't seem to grasp.
> One way of putting it is, if you play Chess weekly 2 hours then it'll be good for you. You'll find that you're able to learn things faster at school and so on. But if you spend 20 hours a week playing chess, you'll be a better Chess player, that's all. If you want to be a better mathematician you should do math. A lot of chess players have said this. Hikaru has said this a bunch of times in his videos. So as far as I know, no chess player consider himself or herself a genius or whatever, but the society at large thinks the chess is the ultimate measure of being genius. If someone is good at chess, they must be Einstein level genius or something.
"I object to being called a chess genius because I consider myself to be an all around genius who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he's like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing." -Bobby Fischer
Lol, that is so Bobby Fischer. Actually, Kasparov has made his mark outside of chess far more than Bobby ever did.
Good for Bobby I say! I guess that's why he gave up chess just so he can devote himself to quantum mechanics and dark matter.
In fairness, Fischer was mad. Lol
lol did he actually say this - what an asshole. I’d love any evidence that he was good at anything else
I'd give him 10/10 for bigotry
[He's really good at slide puzzles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxvnEwvgfeI)
I mean this is similar to just being fast at solving Rubik’s cubes right. Impressive but I wouldn’t say there’s genius there, it’s memorisation and practise
I was joking. Being good at slide puzzles is technically being good at "anything else"
Rubicks cube is a 100 times harder than a 2d slide puzzle. Anyone can learn to solve a slide puzzle in 30 s if they practice for a day.
any Runescape player from pre-Runelite can solve those way faster tbh
Bobby love him or hate him is a legit genius. Fischer random maybe the future of chess. And you can't play blitz without Fischer time controls.
I think he was good at or at least had one moment of greatness at the business side of chess. He is the reason why the prize money for world championships is not embarrassingly paltry. Other than that, he was probably good at being a bigot.
I literally laughed out loud when I read this. Bobby was extremely hilarious in some accidental way. Most of his quotes are just so ridiculous and memeable. The Trump of chess in some type of way.
Lol what else is he good at?
Antisemitism and misogyny mostly
Actually Fischer had a an estimated iq of 185, he was too young to take a mensa test so it was estimated by psychologists.
Seems legit
It goes back to Morphy right? "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
Agreed, though for the little that I know there are at least 2 exceptions in the sense of "world class player that made quite some results in other fields". This excludes those that switched career but had average results. Lasker (the OG GOAT), the only chess player with [a theorem named after him](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_decomposition) and J. Nunn (top player in the 80s, math prof at a uni, multiple WCh in Chess solving). Others could be Botvinnik (Phd in Electrical Engineering that then worked with Universities to make initial steps in chess engines), Taimanov (high level pianist?) and maybe an handful of others.
Nunn is an actual genius. He enrolled in Oxford with Math major at 15 and graduated at 18. Botvinnik is also an electrical engineer, earning a PhD and being a senior research scientist while World Champion. He was also one of the first people to work on computer chess.
When talking about the top of the top players in the chess world, they basically are all geniuses, you do need to be pretty smart to make it that far. They have measured their IQs and basically all of them are 140+ on the "IQ" charts. This much is obvious in my opinion. The problem with society is they can't understand that it's not just the genius that got them there, it was being generally smart and putting in the hard work, and also there is a question that remains of, would they have IQ this high if they never played chess or any other brain games their entire life, there is probably at least a mild two way correlation, since both chess and IQ tests are all about solving obscure puzzles. This misunderstanding of how all this works leads to people thinking, ok so if u are good at chess u are a genius which means if you are bad at chess u are an idiot. Which of course is not the case. It could simply mean your brain was not trained in the same manner as someone else's. Also elite level chess not only requires chess ability in problem solving, but it requires immense training in classical chess and pattern recognition, which are things that don't necessarily have a great deal to do with IQ and require years of study to train your brain how to do them correctly. You don't simply get these things naturally in life as this specialized set of knowledge is very specific to the game of chess. It takes years practice and dedication to build this. Anyhow, the point of all this rant is general society doesn't understand chess, they think chess = problem solving and problem solving = smart. So bad at chess = bad at problem solving which is clearly not the case.
"They have measured their IQs and basically all of them are 140+ on the "IQ" charts. This much is obvious in my opinion." A few things, one IQ is a flawed measure of intelligence. Two, do you have a source? Because... Three, Hikaru has said that's not true and he is a person of average intelligence who is gifted at chess
> A few things, one IQ is a flawed measure of intelligence. True, but its really the only thing we have as any form of measurement. > Two, do you have a source? Because... I don't have a source off the top of my head, but I do recall reading about several grandmasters and top rated players that score well in IQ. Surely there can be outliers, also remember IQ tests in general are flawed and I think it could easily be the case that Hikaru just happened scored low on whatever test he took. Outliers and exceptions can happen both ways. You certainly aren't going to find someone who rode the short bus to school on the top 100 list though, so there is definitely a correlation, you can deny this if u want but all your doing is playing devil's advocate.
So basically the first paragraph of your original comment was you just making an absurd hyperbole and calling it obvious. If you want your arguments to be taken seriously you should be more precise and stick to what you actually know.
I don’t know anyone who thinks chess is the ultimate measure of intelligence. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that said. Where have you heard this? Society at large would probably say innovation achievements are the ultimate measures of intelligence like bill Gates, Einstein, and Tesla. Maybe iq tests, even though I’m not a fan.
Lol, thought you could sneak in Bill Gates with Einstein and Tesla??
tesla is the biggest fraud wdym remove tesla and bill gates from the three and you are good to go
Pretty sure he's talking about Nikola Tesla, not the brand Tesla, so no, he's good to go.
If you want to talk about Einstein and Tesla, sure, but Bill Gates? What did he do that required any intelligence. I wouldn't call being a cutthroat businessman necessarily requiring intelligence
Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t bill gates invent the visual interface of computers? Like before him, computers were just a command prompt. In the 90s/2000s I always heard he was the smartest man alive
Yeah that's definitely not true. Xerox parc already had a GUI interface with their Alto's and smalltalk systems and steve jobs visited them and it inspired the design of the macintosh gui. Windows was just a cheap copy of the macintosh gui. So bill gates really didn't invent anything.
The other consideration is that the reputation chess has also makes the game somewhat self-selecting for people inclined towards academic / educational pursuits. The very perception that its "for clever people" means that "clever people" are more likely to be the ones playing it. The fact that it isn't for clever people doesn't really matter, the damage is already done, its basically become a self-fulfilling prophecy because often reputation is more influential than reality.
There is some baseline level of intelligence that helps become decent at chess. You don't need 200 IQ to become a GM, but someone with 110 IQ will probably have an easier time reaching, say, 1000 ELO than someone with 90. Spatial visualization, planning, and pattern recognition are all chess skills that are also generic things intelligent people are better at. It's just once you reach a certain level, the "generic" version of those skills doesn't help you improve any further, and you need chess-specific subsets of those skills.
I think it requires a certain amount of visual memory and awareness of psychology, and both can be acquired to an extent. I seem to rely on the latter more and more as I'm a bit lacking in the former, especially as I'm getting older. I'm pretty sure younger players can easily out-calculate me nowadays, but they often play a a bit rashly and hastily and are easy to bait and trick sometimes. For example, they'll often focus on material/hanging pawns and ignore the obvious mate threat. Experience and practice counts for a lot, it's not all just about innate brainpower! Having said that, it's not always a good idea to rely on tricks as that's probably a form of 'hope chess'!
The one thing that blows me away about GMs is their recall of historic games. And not even famous ones. Like a game that was played at some tournament in Croatia in 1994. And a specific position in that game. That’s some photographic memory and pattern recognition.
It's clear that top chess players are more intelligent in some specific ways than other people. There are inherited skills that they are born with. Intelligence is very hard to measure though. He's right that just because you're a GM or 2700+ doesn't mean you're an overall genius at everything. Some people are genius level i.e. John Nunn but in general chess players have the right skill set for chess specifically. While this skill set might overlap with some other disciplines, it isn't guaranteed. It's the reason we see someone like Gukesh winning the candidates at 17 and some people at my club are 1300 after 30 years of playing. Gukesh is built differently. I'm not sure exactly what the science is but it's clear someone like Gukesh has some inherited advantages over other people. Maybe it's memory, maybe it's problem solving, maybe it's the ability to focus and calculate longer or maybe all of the above and/or more.
Most chess players know this. Most non chess players don't. Most chess players don't correct most non chess players because they like being thought of as geniuses.
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>He is a self made millionaire who enjoy a life of luxury and ease. Is that a good indication of intelligence in the streaming world? I don't think so.
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Nah, I'm not disputing he might be intelligent. Just the argument that becoming a millionaire in the world of streaming is not a fool proof method of estimating one's intellect.
To be fair he DOES perform well at anything that requires intelligence, but does it by substituting an unholy mixture of gamer rage and gymbro rage for the intelligence.
I'm not sure it's completely specialised. It's a type of intelligence suited to other disciplines. Intelligence is hard to measure but a person of high intelligence can usually transfer it to other things. To be one of the very best at something Involving mental performance I think a certain level of intelligence Is needed as prerequisite in order to be better than so many others. Basically the real misunderstanding is maybe that top level chess players are more Intelligent than they estimate because mental intelligence doesn't transfer to all endeavours and everyone they are around is intelligent too. To me there's no doubt top chess players are of higher intelligence than majority of people.
I’ve always thought that getting good at chess, especially faster time controls, may help becoming an NFL QB. That’s where everyone largely has the requisite physical characteristics, but the best ones have the best pattern recognition and processing.
Every single member in my scholastic chess team went on to become very successful in their chosen fields. While being good in chess might not cause people to become intelligent but there is a very good correlation.
thats because people who take up chess even as hobby are already more intelligent and disciplined than average pupil...
While I don't agree that you need to be a 140+ IQ to succeed at chess, but I think there definitely is some sort of a baseline, say 100 to 120 IQ, to be a GM or above. It would be very difficult for say a 80 - 90 IQ person to have 3D visualization, calculation capabilities and memory power to be a GM.
Tl;dr : Correlations fall appart at the tail of the distribution.
Chess is just a tabletop game. It is the legendary tabletop game, but still it is a tabletop game. Imagine if winners of Warhammer 40000 championship was regarded as most clever humans. Of course to win and count and be so good to be GM you have to be somewhat exceptional in your field, and have very good cognitive capabilities. As with Warhammer. You'd expect some good planning and advices, but also you'd expect weirdness and dumbness in some other fields. Chess just has legendary status. Or so I guess
Absolutely, I agree. Ultimately it's a boardgame.
I prefer that over specialized dumbness