>>13572512Hikaru couldn't even score higher than 105 on an Internet meme IQ test with inflated scores, and he's one of the top two blitz players in the world. Kasparov apparently has a midwit IQ in the 130s. Go to YouTube and listen to the top players banter on banter blitz if you want to disabuse yourself of the notion that top-level players are necessarily geniuses. It's my belief that Lasker was the only chess world champ with an IQ above 150. In general, it seems that high intelligence gets in the way of good chess play, which is why guys like Heisman, Dvoretsky, and Watson got bogged down in NM/IM land writing high-IQ chess books and why the most articulate, intelligent chess YouTubers are invariably IMs. It's also hard for people with 150+ IQs to dedicate years to mastering chess instead of pursuing math or physics or something more interesting.
When people say chess is about memorization, they're right, but not in the crude sense of sitting down and deliberately committing shit to memory, except for opening lines and many solved endgames.
Tactics and positional play are heavily based on pattern recognition, a less crude form of memorization but still a form of memorization. You can test this yourself by playing Puzzle Rush for a few months and seeing how quickly you improve at spotting tactics and calculating. It's not that your IQ has improved, any more than your IQ has improved when you become a better driver who's more perceptive on the road.
