Why Are Some People So Good At Chess?

Being good at chess is less about raw IQ and more about a specific blend of skills built over years of practice. Grandmasters recognise board positions as memorised "chunks" stored in long-term memory, lean on visual-spatial rather than purely logical brain circuits, and suppress the brain's wandering Default Mode Network to stay focused. Pure deliberate practice, often from age 5 to 10 onward, is what stitches all of this together.

I grew up in a house filled with piles of folded newspapers scribbled with ink marks around Sudoku boxes and wooden chess boards with hinges that closed like a suitcase, carrying kings and queens and their loyal troopers, along with a few animals. The wooden pieces would elegantly glide across the battlefield or make small hops that made a knocking sound on the board, loudest and usually accompanied by a sly grin when victory was finally achieved: checkmate.

My father and brother were nothing short of math wizards to me, and I have no shame admitting that I have never won a game against them. Rather, what interested me is how their brains conjured up a plethora of outcomes from a single move, a process that became increasingly more chaotic and ugly as the game progressed.

‘Chunking’ Theory

Chess is undeniably exhausting, and it heavily taxes our mental resources. Naturally, one would infer that chess requires a blend of logical or computational skills, as well as astute decision-making. In his Nobel prize-winning lecture, Daniel Kahneman claims that decision-making arises from two interacting systems. System 1 is fast, automatic and effortless; this is our intuition.

System 2, however, is slow, controlled and effortful, which is our deliberative thinking. There’s a consensus that professionals rely heavily on system 2 while playing chess.

One theory, known as the ‘chunking theory’, has shown that chess grandmasters recruit deliberative thinking and use their long-term memory to achieve success.  These memories are accessed in large ‘chunks’, whereas an amateur relies on more recent memories to make sense of new information. These chunks are patterns of play that they memorize with intense practice, usually spanning decades!

Thinking in chunks allows these chess masters to process games more holistically than novices. Through severe training, it seems that their intuition is actually based on accumulated knowledge that is further honed and perfected by deliberation. Irrespective of its splendor and beauty, chess players literally seem to be artists who tend to look at the bigger picture when they gaze into their checkered drawing boards.    

The study rates a player by his or her ability to decide the best move. The players are presented with boards in the middle of a game and asked to pick an advantageous move. It seems that experts can more rapidly perceive important aspects of the positions, and through a deliberative process, generate their best move. On the other hand, novices aren’t patient or capable enough to go through large simulations to decide their move, which results in weaker moves.

Why Logical Skills Aren’t Enough?

We know that logical thinking arises from the prefrontal cortex, but the advent of fMRI technology has led to new research on chess players that shows a lack of activation in the left lateral frontal lobe, which is normally associated with conventional intelligence and reasoning. Instead, there is activation in the parietal areas, suggesting that chess involves spatial skills.

The study puts the notion of recruiting logical circuits in doubt and makes it reasonable to ask whether playing good chess requires computational skills or spatial ones. It also suggests that the same area may be capable of handling more complex spatial tasks, such as mental rotation, simulating plausible moves in your head, and interaction between stored knowledge and incoming spatial information.

Stanislas Dehaene, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit and an experimental psychologist, advocates this view, claiming that humans and some animals are born with an intuitive sense of numbers and computation that is closely linked to spatial representation.

Memory doesn’t only behave as a vessel for vast amounts of knowledge but also to skillfully organize this knowledge. Chess relies on both general and visual-spatial intelligence, which is responsible for object or pattern recognition and their relations.

The DMN And Structural Changes

Moreover, the study shows that masters and grandmasters tend to effortlessly suppress what is called our Default Mode Network (DMN), as compared to novices, while engaged in a match. The DMN is one your brain’s most important neuronal networks and using it is the brain’s favorite guilty pleasure, given that it utilizes the least amount of purposeful thinking and lets your mind wander into irrelevant thoughts. Suppressing the DMN supplements concentration and helps chess players sharpen their focus.

Another study showed that compared to amateurs, experts showed reduced grey matter volume bilaterally in the caudate nucleus, the tiny part of the brain astride our thalamus. The authors associate this reduction or neuronal pruning with the elimination of redundant or unused synapses. These astonishing structural changes are owed to our neurological plasticity and its sculpting by long-term intensive chess training.

The number of possible chess games (the Shannon number, roughly 10¹²⁰) is vastly larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe (roughly 10⁸⁰). My childhood humiliations still haunt me and even thinking about the innumerable possibilities in which a game could go still makes me anxious. Playing chess requires an abstract skill set that relies on a multitude of cognitive functions and their interactions.

Many future grandmasters start serious chess training around age 5 to 10 (Magnus Carlsen began at 5; Sergey Karjakin earned the grandmaster title at 12 years 7 months, a record that stood until Abhimanyu Mishra claimed it at 12 years 4 months in 2021), though some come to it later. Their deliberate practice fine-tunes their mental demands to this particular sport and augments their conceptual thinking to heights that baffle us “mere mortals”.

Does Being Good At Chess Mean You’re Intelligent?

It is tempting to read a strong chess rating as a stamp of raw intelligence, and the data offer partial support. A 2016 meta-analysis by Alexander Burgoyne and colleagues, pooling 19 studies, found that chess skill correlates positively with general cognitive ability. Fluid reasoning, short-term memory and processing speed each tracked chess rating at around r = 0.24, and, curiously, chess skill lined up more closely with numerical ability (r = 0.35) than with verbal (0.19) or visuospatial (0.13) ability.

There is a catch, though. That link was strongest among young and lower-rated players (r ≈ 0.32) and faded to almost nothing among adult and elite players (r ≈ 0.11 to 0.14). Once you reach the very top, everyone is already sharp, so intelligence stops separating the winners from the also-rans. Being good at chess is a modest early clue that someone scores well on cognitive tests, not proof of all-round genius.

Does chess itself make you smarter elsewhere? Mostly, no. Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet have shown that chess skill is largely context-bound; the so-called “far transfer” to mathematics or reading that turns up in weakly controlled studies tends to shrink once proper control groups are added. Being good at chess, it seems, mostly means you are good at chess. Whether that kind of ability is even fixed in the first place is its own rabbit hole, one we wander down in is your IQ fixed for life.

Are Some People Naturally Good At Chess, Or Is It Just Practice?

“Are some people simply born for the board?” is the question every outgunned amateur (myself included) eventually asks. The honest answer is that practice does most of the heavy lifting, but not all of it. In their 2014 meta-analysis, Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald found that accumulated deliberate practice explained about 26% of the differences in performance across games; a chess-specific reanalysis by Hambrick’s group nudged that figure to roughly a third. That still leaves most of the gap between players unexplained.

The most striking evidence comes from Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli, who combed through the practice logs of competitive players. To reach master level (2,200 Elo), some needed only about 3,000 hours, while others ground through more than 23,000, an eightfold spread, and a handful logged over 25,000 hours without ever getting there. Practice, they concluded, is necessary but not sufficient.

Starting young matters too, and on its own. In the same study, a player who took up chess by age 12 had roughly a 1-in-4 chance of reaching international level (International Master or Grandmaster), against just 1 in 50 for those who began later, even after their practice hours were taken into account. Nobody is born a grandmaster, but talent, an early start and tens of thousands of hours of practice all conspire to decide who becomes one.