Good chess players are really smart, right? Actually no. Science Magazine excerpt
raylopez99
Good chess players are really smart, right? Only up to a point,
according to a study that concludes practice is more important than
brains.
Merim Bilalie, a psychology doctoral student at Oxford University in
the U.K., studied 57 primary and secondary school chess players,
giving them chess problems and IQ tests and logging their daily chess
practice.
Although years of experience and IQ correlated with chess skills, the
researchers found that the highest correlation was with the number of
hours a day the children spent playing or studying the game. And among
the top 23 players (all boys), the correlation of chess skill with IQ
disappeared. Within this high-IQ group (average 133, versus 114 for
the other 34 players), it wasn't the brightest but those who practiced
the most who did best, the researchers report in the September issue
of Intelligence. The smartest ones actually practiced less.
Chess has long pitted proponents of "expertise" theory, which
emphasizes the cultivation of specific skills, against those who argue
that talent is important. Psychologist Neil Charness of Florida State
University in Tallahassee says that the study bears out "the drudge
theory of expertise. Once you're about average IQ, the most important
predictor is deliberate practice." But Robert Howard of the University
of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, points out that chess
prodigies "rapidly outpace the average grandmaster" despite much less
practice time.
The Master
It seems to me that examining mainly above average chessplayers
like this is far from ideal. Why not seek out a truly random
sample,
whose IQs average out to about 100 but whose members include a
broad spectrum of different chess ratings and IQ? The selection of
'Primary and Secondary school' students also narrows the field such
that the conclusions apply only to kids. What about those of us who
may be interested in the big picture-- including (boring) adults?
Also,
the sample size (just 57 kids) seems rather small. Can you really
rely upon sweeping conclusions after studying such a small number
of players, all of them kids?
Anyway, I am taking the results seriously and starting right now I
intend to begin practicing. Soon, I expect to be as good as Bruce
Lee, Jackie Chan and the rest at kung fu fighting, regardless of any
differences in our IQ scores. (I realise that in theory, I am
supposed
to practice *less*. But I have a lot of catching up to do--
especially
with regard to the spinning roundhouse kick, five feet off the
ground.)
Seriously, I hope the people reading this thread do not imagine
that they can just practice bad chess six hours a day and thereby
improve. I've known people who got in plenty of practice and never
improved, because they were practicing against another fairly poor
chessplayer and what they practiced was bad chess. The way to
improve is to learn how to play better than you play now, and then
practice doing so. This can involve study (as mentioned above) or
instruction, or even watching your computer as it analyses.
raylopez99
> Seriously, I hope the people reading this thread do not imagine
> that they can just practice bad chess six hours a day and thereby
> improve. I've known people who got in plenty of practice and never
> improved, because they were practicing against another fairly poor
> chessplayer and what they practiced was bad chess. The way to
> improve is to learn how to play better than you play now, and then
> practice doing so. This can involve study (as mentioned above) or
> instruction, or even watching your computer as it analyses.
Seriously, sage advice from somebody who claims to be a patzer in
chess.
Do as I say, not as I do.
RL
SolomonW
I have studies with similar conclusions about people in universities. It is
not necessarily the smart ones that do well.
Part of the reason is that you need much more then just IQ to be a good
chess player.
The Master
> I have studies with similar conclusions about people in universities. It is
> not necessarily the smart ones that do well.
>
> Part of the reason is that you need much more then just IQ to be a good
> chess player.
If you think about what an IQ test actually tests for you will see
that
once again it is the high end that you are suggesting does not
require
special 'smartness' (understood as higher IQ scores) for success at
chess. I say this because on average, university students already
can be expected to have higher IQs than others. So again, we have
people generalising from a skewed sample-- a sample of higher IQ
'youngsters.' What about old timers, or high school dropouts? Can
you generalise that even among such groups (which seem not to
have been tested, judging from the commentaries here) there is no
strong correlation between IQ and chess rating? Or is it more likely
that broad generalisations are being made which don't necessarily
apply to the general population.