Pieces falling into Place
Does chess make you more intelligent?
The Game of Kings - for as long as chess has existed, there have been geniuses at play in the iconic battle of wills.
But does chess sharpen wit?
Many studies have been conducted in past years to investigate the “Chess Effect”, to figure out if playing the game can improve academic ability; they find a strong correlation with increased mathematical proficiency, memory, and concentration.
This fits enormously with the skills of chess: right brain cognitive reasoning and pattern recognition are crucial in chunking gameplay into memorisable openings, endings, and everything in-between.
Constantly monitoring the board for weaknesses forces one to pay immense attention, which clearly challenges one's patience, skills both crucial in the problem-solving of mathematical fields.
Additionally, there is the human factor; a fallible opponent forces one to think flexibly and creatively, both to predict future moves and to pry open weaknesses - could this help empathetic skills and more effective understanding of people?
“Chess grips its exponent, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom and independence of even the strongest character cannot remain unaffected.” - attributed to Einstein
Focus is the uniting force here: chess forces players to spin plates, multi-facetedly evaluating and weighing up both tactical and strategic moves, without ever breaking immersion.
However, this paramount tenet becomes increasingly insidious due to its toll on the brain at high-level gameplay:
Monomania (single-minded obsessionism), insanity, paranoia - these all crop up in the history of chess. Complete devotion is demanded to be the best, and the perpetual fear of defeat overwhelms any boosts to cognition.
One such example was Steinitz, a universally-accoladed grandmaster who, after losing a pivotal game in 1896, descended into a mental breakdown - ruminating over errors, isolating himself, and under such delusions as believing he was playing chess with God (he had the upper hand of course, despite giving the All Powerful a free pawn).
Is the brain-teaser more of a brain-breaker?
“The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.” - epigram attributed to Paul Morphy, a master chess player
To return to pedagogy, the correlation between academic performance and chess doesn't necessitate a causal relationship – most research supports the view that the former is indicative of the latter, ie. some with ostensibly higher intelligence are more likely to find chess interesting and spend more time deliberately practising it.
It is crucial also to remember the many forms in which intelligence manifests in, and that IQ and academic performance and cleverness shouldn't be conflated with one another.
To conclude: although cognitive creativity, sequence recognition, and mental computation might be honed through the gamified series of puzzles, it is the deliberate and consistent effort to learn that really contributes to the perceived intelligence associated with chess.
(And to pseudointellectual chess enthusiasts who believe in the superiority of the game to other mediums of learning, that's checkmate, lest you become chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.)
Simon Cockling
https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/steinitzgod.html
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5322219/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9028252/#B19-children-09-00477
