The smartest chess players and their IQs

Two champions on this list have reported scores rather than estimates. Bobby Fischer's 187 is said to come from a school test, though the original record has never been published. Garry Kasparov scored 135 on a test arranged by Der Spiegel in 1987, a test that also found an exceptional memory. The other champions, from Morphy to Tal, have editorial markers built from their documented lives.

Those reported numbers are why this ranking keeps claimed scores, labelled as such, instead of leaving them out. Each profile explains how solid the claim is.

Studies of chess players find a positive but moderate link between IQ and playing strength, stronger among children and novices than among experts. At the top, the main difference between players is not raw reasoning but hours of study and the huge library of patterns that study builds. Kasparov's 135 sits comfortably above average, not off the scale, and he was world champion for 15 years.

Chess masters do show exceptional memory for real game positions, but much less for random arrangements of pieces. That classic finding, from Adriaan de Groot and later William Chase and Herbert Simon, shows that their skill is built on chess knowledge rather than a general super-memory.

Several champions had brilliant minds beyond the board. Emanuel Lasker earned a mathematics doctorate and proved a theorem later extended by Emmy Noether; Morphy finished a law degree at 19; Tal entered university at 15. Those achievements, more than chess results, are what lift their markers.