Can chess raise your IQ?

There is no good evidence that it does. A 2016 meta-analysis of 24 studies found a moderate average effect of chess lessons on children's cognitive and academic skills, but a later analysis by the same researchers showed that the effects were smaller in studies with better controls, and a large randomised trial in England found no difference between pupils who had chess lessons and those who did not on any outcome measured.

Do chess players have a high IQ?

On average, a little higher than non-players, and stronger players tend to score a little higher than weaker ones. A 2016 meta-analysis of 19 studies with 1,779 participants found an average correlation of about .24 between chess skill and measured cognitive abilities. That is a modest link: plenty of strong players have ordinary scores, and practice explains more of chess skill than IQ does.

Is chess good for your brain?

Chess is a demanding, absorbing mental activity, and in older people regular mentally stimulating leisure, including board games, is associated with a lower risk of dementia. Those findings come from observational studies, so they cannot show that chess itself protects the brain. It is a good hobby for the mind; it is not a proven treatment.

Is chess good for children?

It can be a worthwhile activity, and some school studies report small gains in maths, especially for children who were bored or unhappy at school. But in the strongest trials chess lessons did not beat ordinary teaching or other activities. Choose chess because a child enjoys it, not as a shortcut to higher grades or IQ.

What does chess actually improve?

Chess skill itself. Classic studies showed that masters remember real game positions far better than novices, but their advantage largely disappears when the pieces are placed at random. Their expertise is largely stored knowledge of chess patterns, which is why it does not transfer easily to other tasks.

Does Chess Make You Smarter? Chess, IQ and the Brain

Q: Does chess make you smarter?

Not in the general sense. People who are good at chess score somewhat higher on intelligence tests on average, but studies that teach chess and then measure general thinking skills find small effects, and those effects shrink or vanish in the best-designed trials. Chess reliably makes you better at chess: you learn to recognise patterns on the board and plan within the game. Evidence that this carries over to unrelated problems is weak.

No — there is no good evidence that playing chess makes you smarter in general or raises your IQ. Strong players do score a little higher on intelligence tests on average, but that mostly reflects who takes up chess and sticks with it. When researchers teach chess and measure what changes, the gains are small and shrink in the best-designed studies. What chess reliably improves is chess.

Two different questions

“Does chess make you smarter?” mixes up two questions. The first is whether chess players are cleverer than other people. The second is whether learning chess makes someone cleverer. A link between chess and intelligence answers the first question but not the second: bright people may simply be drawn to the game and do well at it. Only studies that teach chess and compare the learners with a fair control group can answer the second.

Are chess players more intelligent?

Somewhat. A 2016 meta-analysis pooled 19 studies with 1,779 participants, ranging from beginners to players rated above 2,600. Chess skill correlated with every broad ability measured:

fluid reasoning: about .24
comprehension and knowledge: .22
short-term memory: .25
processing speed: .24

The average was .24 — a real but modest relationship. The link with fluid reasoning was stronger in young players (.32) than in adults (.11), and stronger among unranked players than among ranked ones. Numerical ability mattered more than verbal or visuospatial ability.

Practice matters more. In a study of 57 young players, the amount of practice had the biggest influence on chess skill, though intelligence still explained a little more. Among the 23 most skilled children, intelligence did not predict skill at all and, if anything, ran the other way — because in that group the less intelligent children had practised more. An early study from 1927 found no difference in general intelligence between eight grandmasters and non-players.

Does learning chess make you smarter?

This is the question schools care about, and the evidence has shifted. In 2016 Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet combined 24 studies with more than 5,000 children. Chess lessons showed a moderate overall effect on cognitive and academic skills (g = 0.34), slightly larger for maths (0.38) than for reading (0.25), and larger with more hours of instruction.

The same researchers then looked at design quality. In meta-analyses of chess, music and working-memory training, the effects were smaller in the studies with better controls, such as a comparison group that did another engaging activity instead of nothing. Their conclusion: “far transfer” — a skill trained in one domain improving performance in an unrelated one — rarely occurs.

The largest trial points the same way. In England, 1,965 Year 5 pupils received chess lessons in school and 1,900 did not. When the pupils were tested a year after the lessons ended, the two groups did not differ on any of the outcomes measured.

Not every result is negative. In a Danish study of 482 children in grades 1–3 in Aarhus, replacing one of four weekly maths lessons with chess-based maths, about 30 lessons in all, produced a small gain of about 0.1 to 0.18 standard deviations in maths, and a larger gain among children who had been bored or unhappy at school. That looks less like chess raising intelligence and more like a different way of teaching engaging children who had switched off.

Why the skill stays on the board

A classic 1973 study showed why. Chess masters glanced at a position from a real game for five seconds and reconstructed it far more accurately than novices. When the same pieces were placed at random, their advantage largely disappeared. A master’s edge is a huge store of familiar patterns, not a general-purpose memory or reasoning engine. Later research refined the details but not the lesson: expertise is specific. The same pattern appears in brain training and in the Mozart effect — practice improves the practised task; transfer to everything else is the hard part.

This connects to the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Chess knowledge behaves like crystallized intelligence for one narrow domain. It does not train the general reasoning that IQ tests such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices try to measure.

Chess and the ageing brain

A 2003 study followed 469 people over the age of 75 for about five years. Those who often read, played board games, played a musical instrument or danced were less likely to develop dementia, and each extra day a week of cognitive activity was linked to about a 7% lower risk. The authors were explicit that controlled trials are needed: people in the earliest, undiagnosed stages of decline may simply give up demanding hobbies. Chess is a good way to stay mentally active; it has not been shown to prevent dementia.

Should you play chess?

Play it because you enjoy it. Chess is a deep, social and absorbing game; that is reason enough.
Expect to get better at chess. Calculation, pattern recognition and planning on the board will improve with practice and study.
Do not expect an IQ boost. No study shows that adults raise their general intelligence by playing.
For children, judge it as an activity. It can engage some children, but it has not beaten ordinary teaching in the best trials.

If you want to know what does change measured intelligence, our guide on whether you can increase your IQ covers education, the methods that failed and why scores move. Reading is one habit with better evidence behind it — see does reading make you smarter?

Trust and scope notes

This page summarises published research for general information. Most of the studies on chess players are correlational; we say where a result comes from a controlled trial. The IQ Revealed test is an online reasoning test of 40 original items for adults aged 18 and over; it is not a clinical assessment, and our guide to how IQ tests work explains what an online test can and cannot tell you.

IQ Revealed is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to FIDE, any chess federation, the journals, universities, researchers or trials named on this page, or the publisher of Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Names are used only to identify the research being described.

Does Chess Make You Smarter? What the Research Shows