Does Chess Actually Make You Smarter? What the Research Says

Chess carries a reputation it did not entirely earn. Search for the benefits of playing and you will find confident claims that it raises IQ, improves children's maths scores, and protects against dementia.

Some of that is supported. A good deal of it is weaker than it looks. Since a fair number of our members took the game up partly for the supposed brain benefits, it seemed worth going through what the research actually found.

The honest summary is more interesting than the marketing version.

The claim that chess protects against dementia

This one traces back to a specific, serious piece of work: Verghese and colleagues, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003, titled "Leisure Activities and the Risk of Dementia in the Elderly."

What the study did

The researchers followed 469 community-dwelling adults over the age of 75 who did not have dementia at the start. They tracked which leisure activities people took part in, and followed them for a median of about five years. Over that period, 124 participants developed dementia.

What it found

Reading, playing board games, playing a musical instrument and dancing were all associated with a reduced risk of dementia.

The headline number in the abstract is for a composite cognitive-activity score rather than for any single activity. Each one-point increase in that score was associated with a reduced risk of dementia, with a hazard ratio of 0.93 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.90 to 0.97.

Notably, a one-point increase in the physical-activity score showed a hazard ratio of 1.00, meaning no measurable association in this particular cohort.

The researchers also addressed the obvious objection, which is that people in the earliest undetected stages of dementia might simply do fewer activities. The association held after excluding participants with possible preclinical dementia at baseline.

What it does not show

You will frequently see this study cited as "playing board games cuts your dementia risk by 74 percent." That specific figure appears in secondary coverage of the study rather than in the abstract, and we were not able to confirm it against the primary text. We would not repeat it as fact.

More importantly, this is an observational cohort study, not a trial. Nobody was randomly assigned to play board games. People who play board games in their eighties differ from people who do not in many ways, including education, social connection, baseline cognitive function and general health. Those differences are hard to fully adjust for.

The authors were careful about this themselves, noting that controlled trials would be needed to establish a protective effect.

The finding is real and worth knowing. The causal claim built on top of it is not established.

The claim that chess makes children better at school

This is where the evidence gets noticeably weaker, and where the research community has had a genuine argument.

The optimistic version

A 2016 meta-analysis by Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet pooled 24 studies and 40 effect sizes on chess instruction in children. It reported positive effects on mathematics and on overall cognitive ability.

Taken alone, that sounds like strong support for chess in schools.

The problem the same authors then raised

The same researchers noted something important about that body of work: almost none of the studies compared chess groups against active control groups.

An active control is a group that does some other structured, novel, engaging activity for the same amount of time. Without one, you cannot separate the effect of chess from the effect of a teacher giving a group of children focused attention on something interesting. That is a placebo-shaped hole in the evidence.

The skeptical follow-up

In 2017, Sala and Gobet published "Does Far Transfer Exist? Negative Evidence from Chess, Music, and Working Memory Training" in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

They found that effect sizes were inversely related to the quality of the experimental design. Put plainly: the better the study, the smaller the effect. When the analysis was restricted to the best-designed studies, there was little or no evidence of far transfer.

Their conclusion was that this pattern casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of chess, music and working memory training as general cognitive interventions, and that far transfer of learning rarely occurs.

What "far transfer" means

Far transfer is when a skill learned in one domain improves performance in a domain only loosely related to it. Chess improving mathematics is the classic example of the claim.

Near transfer, by contrast, is chess making you better at chess-like tasks, which is uncontroversial and well supported.

The weight of careful evidence suggests near transfer happens and far transfer mostly does not.

So what does chess reliably do?

It makes you better at chess. That sounds like a joke and is not meant as one.

Getting better at chess involves real, sustained concentration, pattern recognition built over hundreds of positions, calculating consequences several moves ahead, and the specific discipline of checking your assumptions before committing. Those are genuine skills. The evidence simply suggests they stay largely inside the domain rather than radiating outward into unrelated ones.

There is also a category of benefit the cognitive research is not really measuring. A weekly club gets people out of the house, sitting across from other people, in sustained face-to-face attention. For older adults in particular, social contact and regular routine are not small things.

The Verghese study is often read as being about the chessboard. It may be at least partly about the fact that people who play board games are people who regularly sit down with other people.

How to read claims like these

Three questions sort most of this out quickly.

1. Was it a trial or an observational study? Observational studies find

associations. Only randomised trials support causal language like "prevents" or "improves."

1. Was there an active control group? If the comparison group did nothing,

the result may be measuring attention and novelty rather than the activity.

1. Does the effect survive better methodology? If effects shrink as study

quality rises, that pattern usually points towards bias rather than a real effect.

These apply well beyond chess. They are the same questions worth asking about any brain-training product.

Does any of this change whether you should play?

Not really, and that is the point.

Play chess because it is absorbing, because a good game is genuinely satisfying, and because sitting across a board from someone is a better evening than most alternatives. Those reasons do not depend on a hazard ratio.

If it also turns out to be good for you, that is a bonus rather than a justification.

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