[sayemm]

Interesting how he says that extremely high IQ may even be a disadvantage:

And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that. At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess... Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.

And that his big shtick is his focus, intuition, and domain expertise - not his IQ:

No. In terms of our playing skills we are not that far apart. There are many things I am better at than he is. And vice versa. Kasparov can calculate more alternatives, whereas my intuition is better. I immediately know how to rate a situation and what plan is necessary. I am clearly superior to him in that respect.

[dasil003]

This makes sense in that IQ is a measure of general intellectual capacity at the concscious level, but the underlying raw processing power of the human brain is much much greater, we just usually lack the ability to apply it directly to problems—it's like a very high level programming language; whereas mathematical savants or intuition, in this case, can outperform much higher IQs by having a sort of unconscious ASIC under the hood, as it were.

[sayemm]

Nice analogy!

Yes, it's spot-on with K. Anders Ericsson's research on expert performance and deliberate practice:

- http://psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html

- http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/ericsson.lo...

[mcv]

I find it odd and funny that he considers a career in mathematics a distraction. He later says there's more in life than chess, but in this quote he doesn't seem to realize that.

I doubt I'd want to be world champion if it required giving up all those "distractions".

[philh]

Sounds to me like he's speaking descriptively, not normatively. He doesn't say that Nunn shouldn't have gone down the path that he did; just that Nunn could have been world champion, if that had been all he'd focused on.

[sayemm]

And when it really comes down to it, I'd argue that's the personal sacrifice that's required to become great at anything.

Just like PG says in The Anatomy of Determination - http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html

[taurath]

If you're just talking about becoming a chess champion, it is.