IQ helps but its not going to make you great automatically. I would equate it to height in basketball. Obviously, being 7'0 is an advantage but Jordan is still going to torch most 7 footers. Someone with Jordan's skill who was also 7' would probably beat Jordan but that combination of talent and skill is likely to never happen.
We can break it down mathematically (assuming IQ perfectly measures intelligence). An IQ of 100 is considered average. An IQ of 150 means that person is able to learn at 1.5x the average person. A 200 IQ means 2x and so on. I've heard that 1800 means you can see two moves ahead. A lot of inexperienced players may misunderstand that statement. Two moves ahead means I can see every move I can make, every potential response you can make, every response to your response and finally every response by you. If we do the math, that means an 1800 player is considering roughly 2.5 million positions in a typical position where each side has 40 legal moves. Yes, there are ways to shortcut that with pattern recognition and knowledge. But, if a 1000 IQ person tried to brute force those calculations it would take roughly 3 days, at one second per position, for someone with no chess knowledge to come up with one single 1800 level move. An 1800 player can see in a minute or two what the world's highest IQ takes days to figure out. An IM can see it in a couple of seconds. A GM is already looking at the endgame.
So, its safe to say a person with a 1000 IQ (which is 4x pretty much anyone..ever and over 5x Einstein) would struggle to play 1800 chess with virtually unlimited time odds. Intelligence by itself doesn't mean much.
On the other hand, if you took two people, one with a 100 IQ and one with a 110 and they had exactly the same study plan from the very beginning you would (theoretically) expect the 110 to have 10% more knowledge and calculate 10% faster and that would translate to a couple extra wins over a large sample size of say a 100 games or more. However, the 100 IQ person could easily make that gap up by spending a couple extra hours of study here and there.
Its the same thing in every sport/game. Natural talent is an advantage but hard work means more. Jordan wasn't the tallest. Jerry Rice wasn't the fastest. And then you look at someone like Shaq who had all the talent in the world but ballooned up to 400 pounds and couldn't make a free throw to save his life.
In a situation where everything else is equal the person with the higher IQ will probably win. However, you'll probably never reach a situation where everything else is equal. In general, people with enormous talent rarely come close to their potential and the best at any activity are rarely the people with the most talent.
We can break it down mathematically (assuming IQ perfectly measures intelligence). An IQ of 100 is considered average. An IQ of 150 means that person is able to learn at 1.5x the average person. A 200 IQ means 2x and so on. I've heard that 1800 means you can see two moves ahead. A lot of inexperienced players may misunderstand that statement. Two moves ahead means I can see every move I can make, every potential response you can make, every response to your response and finally every response by you. If we do the math, that means an 1800 player is considering roughly 2.5 million positions in a typical position where each side has 40 legal moves. Yes, there are ways to shortcut that with pattern recognition and knowledge. But, if a 1000 IQ person tried to brute force those calculations it would take roughly 3 days, at one second per position, for someone with no chess knowledge to come up with one single 1800 level move. An 1800 player can see in a minute or two what the world's highest IQ takes days to figure out. An IM can see it in a couple of seconds. A GM is already looking at the endgame.
So, its safe to say a person with a 1000 IQ (which is 4x pretty much anyone..ever and over 5x Einstein) would struggle to play 1800 chess with virtually unlimited time odds. Intelligence by itself doesn't mean much.
On the other hand, if you took two people, one with a 100 IQ and one with a 110 and they had exactly the same study plan from the very beginning you would (theoretically) expect the 110 to have 10% more knowledge and calculate 10% faster and that would translate to a couple extra wins over a large sample size of say a 100 games or more. However, the 100 IQ person could easily make that gap up by spending a couple extra hours of study here and there.
Its the same thing in every sport/game. Natural talent is an advantage but hard work means more. Jordan wasn't the tallest. Jerry Rice wasn't the fastest. And then you look at someone like Shaq who had all the talent in the world but ballooned up to 400 pounds and couldn't make a free throw to save his life.
In a situation where everything else is equal the person with the higher IQ will probably win. However, you'll probably never reach a situation where everything else is equal. In general, people with enormous talent rarely come close to their potential and the best at any activity are rarely the people with the most talent.
