That’s often described as natural ability, but it may actually be a description of something that is more like desire, a really huge desire.īobby Fischer claimed he was a genius who happened to play chess, but if you look at his life history he was absolutely obsessed and playing chess constantly from age six.įischer became American champion at the age of 14, which is astonishing. It has to really excite you, so motivation plays a huge part. Also, if you’re a young person, you’re probably rejecting other ways of occupying your time, which most people would think are more pleasurable, whether it’s watching Teen Idol or playing football or having a drink. Quite often, the reason why, as we get older, we lose more games of chess – certainly in my case – is that you begin to get more pain from thinking than you do from losing. Someone once said, “Chess is a battle between your aversion to the pain of losing, and your aversion to the pain of thinking.” Because hard thinking is stressful and difficult. And if it is hard work – and it is – then you must get something really quite special out of it, to put yourself through it. That’s often underestimated, while the idea of effortless genius is greatly overestimated. There is a very boring phrase for that, which is hard work. You really do have to concentrate very hard for long periods. What I have noticed in very strong players, though, is an extraordinary degree of concentration. It wouldn’t surprise me, but I don’t know what the proof is. I don’t know if there is any evidence for that. It was always said that Fischer had an IQ of 180. I’m sure you could find very strong grandmasters with IQs around about the 100 mark, which is the average. It would be difficult to be strong at chess if you had a subnormal IQ, but you certainly don’t need an IQ of above average. But it’s also a sport and a game – it can be played just as a game, and just as a sport.ĭo you have to be very clever to be good at it?
Chess does correspond, in some ways, to what we see in art – it does have a kind of beauty, and the appeal is very strongly aesthetic to those who actually have eyes to see it. It’s interesting that he used the word art. Mikhail Botvinnik, who was world champion on and off from 1948 to 1963, said that if music was “an art that illustrates the beauty of sound”, then chess was “an art that illustrates the beauty of logic”. I don’t think it’s true that chess is a touchstone for the intellect or that it requires an astonishingly logical mind to be very good at it, though it probably helps. It really irritates some of my Russian friends, who say, “What a load of nonsense! It’s just a game.” I’ve always been intrigued by the image chess has in the West as this indicator of extreme, logical intelligence. Foreign Policy & International Relations.