Chess Players Ranked by IQ: Every Number Traced to Its Source

Chess players ranked by IQ is a list nobody can honestly publish, because almost none of them has a published test result. Of the 11 players we checked, only Garry Kasparov has a reported test from a magazine (135), and that is secondhand. The famous 190s trace to no test at all. So we rank by how good the evidence is, below.

We rank by evidence because a list of numbers would repeat the problem. Each profile on our site (linked below) traces its own figure. Here we put the evidence side by side, add what research says about chess and IQ, and show where a 190 can come from.

Who are the highest IQ chess players?

Nobody can be named. The highest numbers online are 190 for Magnus Carlsen, 190 for Kasparov, 182 to 191 for Viswanathan Anand and 170 to 190 for Mikhail Tal. None of them cites a test, a tester or a date on the pages we checked.

The Magnus Carlsen IQ claim is the clearest case. The chess blogs that print 190 name no test. In a March 2010 Der Spiegel interview, reproduced by ChessBase, he said he had no idea what his IQ was. Our Magnus Carlsen profile has the full trace.

Which chess IQ numbers come from a real test?

Three come close, and none is a clean score. Kasparov's 135 was reported from a battery that Der Spiegel commissioned in Hamburg in the late 1980s. We could not open the original issue, so treat it as reported. Fischer's school test at Erasmus Hall is described by his biographer Frank Brady, but no score report has been published.

Nakamura's 102 is real but is not a measurement. It comes from an online matrix-style quiz he took live on stream, reportedly in 2020 or 2021, and no source names the test. Read our Garry Kasparov, Bobby Fischer and Hikaru Nakamura profiles for the details.

Chess players ranked by IQ evidence: the full list

This chess players IQ list runs from the best-supported number to no number at all. Ratings are FIDE ratings from our profiles; "peak" is the highest on record.

• Garry Kasparov: 135 reported from a late-1980s Der Spiegel test (original not opened); 190 circulates with no source; peak rating 2851
• Bobby Fischer: 180, 181 and 187 circulate from a reported school test with no score report; peak rating 2785
• Hikaru Nakamura: 102 from a stream quiz, not a measurement; rated 2792 and No. 2 in October 2026
• Magnus Carlsen: 190 (sometimes 190 to 220) with no source; he said he had no idea; peak rating 2882, 2823 in October 2026
• Viswanathan Anand: 182 to 191 from unsourced lists and a formula; peak rating 2817
• Fabiano Caruana: 145 to 170 "according to reports", no source; peak rating 2844, 2784 in October 2026
• Mikhail Tal: 170 to 190, no test cited; world number one for 32 months from 1958 to 1961 on a retrospective system
• Paul Morphy: 172.5 from one forum reply in 2005; he died in 1884, before any intelligence scale existed
• Gukesh Dommaraju: no figure; only a generic 140 to 160 for elite players, with no study behind it
• R Praggnanandhaa: no figure circulates; a "game intelligence" score of 177 is a measure of chess moves, not IQ
• Judit Polgar: no figure circulates; her father László Polgár argued that genius is trained, not born

Where does a chess IQ of 190 come from?

Often from arithmetic, not a test. One chess site prints the formula IQ = 100 + 0.06 x (Elo – 1300) and calls it a fun, unofficial tool that psychologists do not endorse. At Anand's peak rating of 2817 it returns 191.0. At Carlsen's peak of 2882 it returns 194.9.

The 190s that circulate match what such formulas give for a rating near 2800. That is a reason to be suspicious, not proof of where each number began. A rating measures how well someone plays chess. It was never calibrated against an IQ test. Our guide to chess ratings and IQ explains why.

Does a high chess rating mean a high IQ?

Not strongly. A 2016 meta-analysis in the journal Intelligence pooled 19 studies and 1,779 people. It found chess skill correlated about .24 with cognitive ability on average, and the 2018 corrigendum put the average at .22. The link was stronger for fluid reasoning in children and weaker in adults.

In adult samples the correlation was around .1, which explains about 1% of the differences in skill. In the six effect sizes that used full-scale IQ, the link was not statistically significant. The chess players in those studies averaged an IQ of about 120 on a scale with a standard deviation of 15: well above average, but not the genius range.

A 2007 study of 57 young players by Bilalic, McLeod and Gobet gives the same message. The 23 elite children averaged an IQ of 133 against 114 for the rest. Inside the elite group, though, IQ tended to fall as rating rose, because the lower-IQ children had practised more. These were strong children rated around 1600, not grandmasters.

Is chess skill trained or inborn?

Practice carries most of the weight in that 2007 study. The Polgár sisters are the famous test case. Their father László Polgár argued that a healthy child is a potential genius who is educated and trained, and he taught his three daughters chess. We found no published IQ test of the sisters, so we attach no number to them.

How can you judge any chess IQ number?

• Ask which test, who gave it and when. A real result has all three
• Check whether the number is a rating run through a formula
• Check the scale. A score needs its mean and standard deviation, as in our IQ percentile calculator
• Treat a round 190 as a warning. Real tests have a ceiling near 160, as we explain in why no IQ test can score above 160

For the same method applied to other groups, read our rankings of US presidents by IQ and philosophers by IQ. For a wider view of chess and thinking skills, see chess and IQ.

The short version: chess strength and IQ overlap a little, no top player has a clean published score, and the 190s are stories, not results. To see your own result as a percentile, take the IQ Metrics test.

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