Magnus Carlsen was born on November 30, 1990 in Norway. He is most known for his chess aptitude, widely recognized as one of the best players currently, if not of all time in terms of his ability to tackle complex positions and calculate precisely. Magnus would start off as a child prodigy at five and was inspired to beat his elder sister at chess.
At a very young age Carlsen would demonstrate many great feats of memory such as memorizing the names of countries, assembling puzzles, and eventually playing chess blindfolded against multiple opponents. He is currently known as the #1 player who has held onto the World Chess Championship for multiple times in a row until he no longer wished to compete. He also holds the record for highest FIDE elo of 2882.
With all of these feats, one may ponder just how smart Magnus is. Although there are claims of his IQ reaching into the profoundly gifted range of 180+, or 1 in 20,000,000, there is no conclusive evidence to back this up. Although he is certainly one of the best, if not the best chess player alive currently, chess has a rather low correlation to intelligence. There is no official record of Magnus ever taking an IQ test, so our estimation here will employ various techniques used in historiometry to deduce the IQ of the grandmaster.
First we can draw in and relate Magnus to the IQs of well-known strong chess masters, name those covered in our other articles. Bobby Fischer, a fellow world-champion, leads the pack with an IQ of 155, followed by Garry Kasparov with an IQ of 135, followed by strong chess players such as Hikaru and Judit Polgar. From this, we can draw the possible conclusion that the correlation isn’t exactly very strong to IQ, however, one thing is, and that is the fact that they have all started playing chess at a young age. This taps into the phenomenon known as synaptic pruning where superfluous synapses are pruned to speed up certain processes. As such, if one practices chess from a young age with greater neuroplasticity, they would certainly have a much greater advantage than someone who is much older.
However, this is not to disregard Magnus at all. Magnus has a strong memory, something rather obvious given by how easily he remembers over thousands of past chess positions to many other memory feats. We rank him as exceptionally gifted here.
Magnus also features strong visualization abilities, being able to calculate various drawn-out complex lines in chess, as well as play blindfolded. This means we rank him as highly gifted here.
Magnus however does not have many feats for other areas such as verbal and nonverbal ability. However, we shall place him at the gifted range for these indexes with them being at the 98th percentile.
Using our algorithm and score calculations with weighted averages, we draw the estimation that Magnus is likely in the IQ range of 143 to 163 (1 in 500 to 1 in 75,000). Please note that this is merely an estimation, and that his IQ could be lower or higher as there is no definitive data. Our results follow certain historiometric analysis techniques which are not perfect. However, we can say for ourselves that the range given is reasonable given the other known IQs of the chess players. For example, Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov were not in the profoundly gifted range, even though many claim they were. Sources claiming Magnus to be in the 180-190 IQ range are unverified as Magnus has never claimed to take an IQ test. Additionally, we would like to say Chess is more indicative of childhood intervention and precocity than it is intelligence, as concluded by multiple studies which found a crude correlation between the two.
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