Does Chess Increase IQ? What Chess Training Can Really Change
Chess looks like the perfect IQ workout: patterns, calculation, memory, planning, and constant problem solving. The catch is simple—getting better at chess and raising general intelligence are two different outcomes.
Chess can make you much better at chess, and it may strengthen some related cognitive skills. Research has not established that chess training reliably produces a broad, lasting increase in IQ. Some studies report encouraging gains, including improvements on intelligence measures, while stronger transfer research gives a much more cautious picture.
If your real question is whether chess makes you mentally sharper in a broader everyday sense, see Cognitive Train’s guide to what chess trains and whether it makes you smarter. This page tackles the narrower IQ question.
Why Chess Seems Like It Should Raise IQ
Chess uses several abilities that also appear in intelligence research. Players hold candidate moves in mind, recognize visual patterns, compare alternatives, inhibit tempting mistakes, and calculate consequences several steps ahead.
That overlap makes the idea plausible. It does not prove transfer.
Imagine practicing free throws every day. You would expect your free-throw shooting to improve. You might also improve at nearby basketball skills. It would take much stronger evidence to claim that the practice raised your overall athletic ability across unrelated sports. Cognitive training has the same problem: the farther a gain travels from the practiced task, the harder it is to show that a broad ability changed.
Chess Skill and Cognitive Ability Are Related
Good chess players do tend to score higher on several cognitive measures.
A 2016 meta-analysis found an overall positive relationship between chess skill and cognitive ability. In the authors’ later correction, the average association remained significant at about r = .22. The corrected analysis still found significant relationships for fluid reasoning and short-term/working memory, while the links with processing speed and crystallized/comprehension-knowledge were no longer statistically significant.
That result tells us that cognitive ability matters for learning chess. It does not tell us which direction the arrow points. People with stronger reasoning or memory may learn chess faster, people who enjoy cognitively demanding activities may be more likely to stick with chess, chess practice may contribute something, or all three may be true.
This is the same distinction discussed in our guides to working memory and IQ and processing speed and IQ: related abilities can correlate without being interchangeable.
What Happens When Researchers Actually Teach Chess?
This is the more important test. If chess itself raises intelligence, people assigned to chess training should improve more than appropriate comparison groups on measures they never directly practiced.
A 2016 meta-analysis examined 24 chess-instruction studies involving more than 5,000 young people. Across mathematics, reading, and general cognitive outcomes, the researchers found a moderate overall benefit associated with chess instruction.
That sounds impressive until you look at study design. The authors emphasized that none of the included studies had the ideal combination of pre- and post-testing, full random allocation, a passive control group, and an active control group. Active controls matter because a special chess class may create extra attention, motivation, novelty, or expectations that have nothing uniquely to do with chess.
So the early literature was promising, but it left an important causal question open.
A Direct IQ Study Did Report a Gain
There is evidence on the positive side that deserves to be taken seriously.
A 2019 Cognitive Science Society proceedings paper followed schoolchildren who received one hour of chess training each week for a year. The chess group included 88 children and the comparison group 90. Using WISC-IV measures, the researchers reported a significant improvement in Full Scale IQ for the chess group relative to the control group.
That is a real finding, and it prevents a simplistic “chess never affects IQ” conclusion. It is still one study. A broad claim that chess reliably raises IQ needs the effect to survive replication, different populations, different instructors, and rigorous active-control designs.
Better-Controlled Transfer Studies Have Been Less Exciting
When researchers tightened the controls, broad benefits became harder to find.
Two experiments published in 2017 compared chess instruction with active alternatives such as checkers or Go. In the larger experiment, 233 children received chess, checkers, or regular school activity. The groups showed no significant post-training differences in mathematical problem solving or metacognitive ability. A second smaller experiment also found no clear chess advantage.
A separate randomized controlled trial involving more than 4,000 children in England found no evidence that chess instruction improved mathematics, reading, or science test scores. Those were academic outcomes, not IQ scores, so the study cannot directly answer the IQ question. It does reinforce a broader lesson: far transfer from a cognitively demanding game is difficult to demonstrate.
What Chess Probably Does Improve
Chess practice builds a huge library of chess-specific patterns. Strong players stop treating every position as a fresh collection of pieces and begin seeing familiar structures, tactical motifs, threats, and candidate plans.
It can also exercise working memory, visual search, planning, calculation, and rapid comparison of alternatives. Those processes overlap with abilities measured in cognitive tests, but overlap does not guarantee that improvement generalizes broadly.
If you want to isolate novel visual rule finding from chess knowledge, try Cognitive Train’s Matrix Reasoning Test. For timed mental efficiency, the Processing Speed Test samples a different part of the cognitive profile.
Does Playing More Chess Mean a Higher IQ?
Not necessarily. Hours played and rating are not clean measures of intelligence. Chess performance reflects practice, coaching, opening knowledge, pattern memory, motivation, age, competitive experience, and cognitive ability together.
A high rating therefore does not translate into a particular IQ, and a modest chess rating does not imply modest intelligence. Our guide to fluid and crystallized intelligence explains why broad reasoning ability and accumulated expertise can contribute to performance in different ways.
Check Your Own Baseline Carefully
If you want an approximate snapshot before or during a period of chess practice, Cognitive Train’s IQ-Style Test samples several reasoning-related abilities and gives an approximate estimate with a skill breakdown.
Do not repeatedly retake it after every few chess sessions. Familiarity with cognitive tests can itself raise scores, which would make it harder to separate chess-related change from ordinary practice effects.
For individual abilities, browse Cognitive Train’s brain tests and cognitive assessments.
So, Does Chess Increase IQ?
Possibly in some people or under some training conditions, but the evidence does not support promising a reliable general IQ increase from playing chess. Chess players often show stronger cognitive performance, and at least one controlled training study has reported an IQ gain. The wider transfer literature is less consistent, especially when researchers use stronger comparison groups.
Play chess because chess is an unusually rich skill: it rewards memory, pattern recognition, planning, calculation, and disciplined decision making. If broader cognitive gains come with it, treat them as a possible bonus instead of the reason the game has value.
For the larger question of changing intelligence, see whether IQ can increase, what actually helps you become smarter, or browse our Intelligence & IQ guides. You can also explore Cognitive Train’s brain training and cognitive training tools for targeted practice in reasoning, memory, attention, and processing speed.