There is a popular conception in culture that a game of Chess represents a purely intellectual match between the players; that the winner will be the player with the best intellect, strategy, insight, and patience. This belief is held almost exclusively by nonplayers, or players with only the most tangential exposure, because it shows false so readily with just a little exposure to the game.

As an example: I’m a smart enough guy, but have no particular aptitude for Chess. I played semi-seriously in a mostly scholastic field (but with some open tournaments) several years ago. Although I’m rusty, I could probably get back to as good as I ever was with a month or two of practice, which would probably put me somewhere near a 1200 USCF  rating. For a club player, 1200 is embarrassingly low. (A rough scale is 1000-2000, with masters at 2200. Usually only novice scholastic players usually end up below 1000, and this is due largely to “rating deflation” [a subject I might cover later].)

Still, if you pitted me against a dozen players of equal intelligence, but with no particular Chess experience, I’d bet you $50 that I’d beat them all. Maybe even with a time handicap or drunk. As far as I can tell, Chess skill is about 30% innate Chess-specific aptitude and 40% practice. 30% is left for some combination of intellect, patience, insight, psyching out the opponent, and whatever other factors are popularly believed to go into the game.

This is salient because the other day, I linked to a source that correctly pointed out this effect for Chess, and then incorrectly claimed that Go would make a better test of intellect. Ack. As nefarious reader Fuleng pointed out in the comments (read his last paragraph especially), skill at Go is just as highly bound to the amount of practice players have. Aptitude, intelligence, and patience are important insofar as they determine how much benefit players get from practice and how fast they improve.