>>11897743>You don't need to be exceptionally smart to be a lawyer. It's a legitimate career too, essential for the proper functioning of the criminal justice system, there is no waste involved.And you don't need to be exceptionally smart to play chess. At least not according to psychologists favourite intelligence measurement tests. Hikaru scored around 100 IQ, far from being a genius. If you knew anything about chess you'd know that past a certain point, it's memorization and studying books to get better. At first yes, you need to be smart, seeing patterns and so on, but once you've done that, after you've trained your brain to see where all your and your opponents pieces can move, you've effecively plateaued in chess when it comes to the intelligence part. From there, it's memorizing tactics, memorizing openings, memorizing theories, and so on. Most chess players can see in an end game if the round is going to end in a draw or not (assuming no one screws up) by simply looking at the position of pawns on the board. It's because they've studied tactics and read a lot of end games and so on. For instance, you don't have to picture all the moves in your head for an endgame where one side is with a king and 1 pawn and the other one with just a king. Depending on the position of the pawn and kings, you can automatically figure out if theres a chance of winning or if it's a draw right away based on theory. No need to picture your head all possible moves by you and your opponents. As a matter of fact, the best of the best chess players (those grandmasters on the international levels) on average see don't see that many moves ahead unless the moves are forced. For instance, magnus carlsen usually sees 15 moves ahead. Now that's not 15 moves with every possible move at each round, it's 15 moves of some specific pieces, so a lot less possibilities than picturing every single possible one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_and_pawn_versus_king_endgame 
