I too don't believe there is a link between IQ and chess playing skill. It all comes down to patience, a constant willingness to learn new things, creativity and vision.

Most of the above the above are subconciously taught when very young. I've been tasked with teaching some kids chess before and some have zero patience. As soon as I met the parents I understood instantly. Sometimes the old chessmaster 'see that rook walk up to the queen and hit her over the head' method works. I am after all dealing with the playstation generation.

Once they learn patience again. Then creativity and vision come into factor.

<Frogspawn Chess Neurolinguistic Dept, contd.> I agree, the chess skill/IQ link is total nonsense. It is expressly promulgated by those who want to believe that (a) IQ tests measure a quality, intelligence, which they themselves possess in vast quantities, as proven by a self-administered test in the back of a magazine, (b) chess ratings are similar, though due to bad luck, culture jamming, wicked tournament directors, heavily armed opponents, weather, etc, they themselves tend to be underrrated and are 'really' of GM strength; and (c) that there is peer group social status available for guys with big ones.

My opinion -- I agree with Jessica that IQ tests basically measure facility with IQ tests. I went off the top of the scale on one once, which doesn't actually make me a 200 IQ genius, though it suggests that a lifestyle revolving around chess, poker, scrabble, go, bridge, cryptic crosswords, sudoku, math puzzles, limericks, and bad puns may well be very good practice for IQ-testing and should be implemented as a universal curriculum at once.

I also agree with JDK about chess aptitude. It seems to use many of the same parts of the brain as learning a language. Young children are hardwired to absorb language (vocab, grammar, structure etc -- and mostly by guessing and testing rather than formal teaching).

Exposure in depth to chess (or maths or music) during this key 'window' lets a person become fluent in chess -- what Bobby Fischer meant by 'I got good'.

It's also the reason there are child prodigies in chess, math and music -- they hijack the language acquisition machinery and apply it to a different formal system, internalising its rules and grammar.

Just as speakers have difficulty explaining their understanding of their native language, maybe these 'natural' chess players -- like Capablanca, who wrote little on chess -- also lack insight into their skill. It simply comes 'naturally' to them.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that those who learn chess early have a huge advantage over those who learned late. I was a late developer, aged 15 or 16 when I began, and always lagged behind the guys who'd already been playing for 10 years.

You can quickly reach a 2000 rating as I did, or 2400/IM level (according to various sources) but you still tend to speak chess with a slight foreign accent.

In mon case propre, it mean I make ze blunders even in my beloved French. And I play deliberately in the nimzoesque/bizarro style so that my lack of fluency looks like a lifestyle choice rather than a total failure.

I admit he can't be *all* bad, given his philosophically positronic robots and his Foundation histori-science and even his non-fic books, but I'm not what you'd call a fan.

To me, Asimov was the old guard, the ancien regime that various new waves (Ballard, Delany, Dick in the 1960s, Gibson in the 80s/90s, Stephenson now) were intent on overthrowing.

Funny how you start making visuals in your mind of some of the kibitzers here at cg's! At least with the people you really like and talk to often.

Congrats my friend, within a few days you have now succesfully taken over <brankat> and <chessgames.com>- chessforums and stormed to <3rd> position in the most popular forum category! You're 50 odd in the clear..

(Jess would say WHEEEEEEE now :)

<You can quickly reach a 2000 rating as I did, or 2400/IM level (according to various sources) but you still tend to speak chess with a slight foreign accent.>

This is very true. In the JDK'o'graph I must be 2800 :-) Elo however, I would be closer to 1300 :-)

I've been sitting here whilst waiting for the disembodied voice to call on that big phoney thing, thinking about what were the main factors for me picking up chess in the first place (as none of my family play it...yet) and it was the wanting to beat my best friend at something else, given that he was king of football manager (think 80's text only game). So in theory if I was good at football manager, I may never have found chess.

(1) Write the whole thing elsewhere, in Word, and paste it in. This does *not* work for me, as I've somehow taught myself to completely ignore all spelling suggestions made by word processors and spellcheckers. "Poluphloisboiotatotic? I'll be the judge of that, if you don't mind, machine."

(2) Is faster and actually does work. All you have to do is check over and edit the post before hitting 'kibitz' -- I often delete chunks of gibberish at this point. The downside is you spend too much time in CG cyber-limbo, and totally lose the thread of any conversation.

- Threads? These things have *threads* now?

['HE', Rameau's Nephew, is explaining his philosophy to 'I', presumably Diderot himself...]

HE: “I like giving orders, and I shall give them. I like being praised, and praised I shall be. And then we shall have women, and all be bosom friends when drunk, and drunk we shall certainly get. We’ll bandy tittle-tattle and go in for all sorts of quirks and vices. It will be lovely...

... We shall prove that Voltaire has no brains, Buffon is always high-falutin and nothing but a windbag, Montesquieu merely a wag, D’Alembert will be relegated to his mathematics, and we shall smite hip and thigh all those little Catos like you, who despise us out of envy, whose modesty is a cloak for pride and whose sobriety is dictated by necessity. And music? Then we shall have some!”

I: "If I were you I should put all these things into writing. It would be a shame if they were lost."

HE: “That’s true, but you don’t suspect how little the method and the rules matter to me. The man who must have a manual won’t ever go far. Geniuses read little, but do a great deal and are their own creators. Look at Caesar…”

<JDK> -- <would you believe it, I ended up being escort to 'South Coast Pop Idol' so didn't get chance to reply until now> I believe it, I believe it, but all the gory details would look great on Frogspawn, Page Three. Or even the cover, decorated with FENs...

Such things are quite subjective, we know. Masters think of everything sub-2400 as incapable of walking upright. Yet some kibitzers on this site speak in excited tones of the dizzy heights of the 1500 zone.

Psychologically, I'm afraid I'm conditioned to regard anything in the 1800s as 'weak'. And now I must face the inexorable truth of my own 'weakness'.

Should I give in, retire, drop out gracefully? Or play in next week's tournament and make goddam sure my performance rating is back up around 2100...?

I am suprised <azaris> is not on that list yet. If not for entirely posts on Spurs :-)

<EA> is of course way in the lead and could take the whole year off and still be #1.

========

Spongebob Squarepants (mindless meanderings of a madman)

I thought Patrick was a giant tounge when I first saw the prog. However, I soon found differently when I discovered his second name.

Ooohhh, he lives in a pinapple under the sea.

<Dom> No i haven't been to church for a while :-) Maybe I should go.

Lot 49, isn't it?

Well, "Pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself."

I notice that you've posted lately on the Carlsen page, so that might actually be true according to the azaris theorem:

<achieve> -- incroyable! -- even though I'd been checking the stats, I thought I was still some way behind.

Also, several of those whom Jess is fast catching up on are pretty static, so she should jump from 40th to 35th to 30th in a few days... and then everyone can watch out.

Actually, I think this Asimov quote is interesting. I can't stand 'old' jokes -- well, not strictly true, as repetition of Stanshall or JCC bears out (are these even 'jokes', though?). But I've noticed that some people seem to derive pleasure from the oldness itself -- "Ahhh, listen to this, this is the bit where he goes..." -- while the old stuff that I happen to like is more, um, like a fine wine or something.

Nah, it doesn't really work, and I'm just being snobbish. What I don't like is the repetition of jokes-I-don't-like. Very circular, that.

Many puns seem obvious to me. This is often because they *are* obvious, and have been made 10,000 times before. But I've also been told that not everyone responds to a chunk of speech by turning all the words inside out.

Takes all sorts, dunnit?

Of the many, many books out there on and about puns and paronomastics, one of my faves is 'Puns' by Walter Redfern. He walks a crazy-paving delicate line between the scholarly and the raving mad, mixing actual history and linguistics with splurges of word association football. Premiership material, too.

Speaking of football, Staunton's Irish squad grows more woeful by the second. Mr Keane, he right: fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Wales to wallop 'em.

I've heard that Roy also does a mean version of Positively 4th Street -- "You got a lot o' nerve, boy, to say ye're my friend..."

As far as your droppy in rating.. No feelings of sympathy here.. We all experience the occasional setback.

<Your IQ> can drop only "temporarily" by visiting the Magnus page so no worrier there. You're still way upthere with the best ;-) (Kaspy is on 190)

The fact that you think Jess is climbing up from 40 etc. IS worrysome-- Jess is over 2.000 posts at her flat now so already in the top 10 if she wouldn't have gone downtown partying yesterday imo.

Kidding aside, When did you last play rated in Ireland? Your analysis in the World vs AN game was very impressive!

Nothing wrong with <Dom>'s Calculus so to speak!

<Jess>'s forum is by far the most popular looking at the number of days it is open now.

My favs are hers and Dom's and Brankat's and other's and numbers do not really bother me that much.

;-)