I think there's some correlation but no, you can be amazingly strong at chess and not super-intelligent by other measures, or be incredibly good at physics or philosophy or poetry or whatever and have no talent for chess.

But, having watched some of Naroditsky's videos, it seems pretty clear that he was in fact very intelligent as well as very good at chess.

Maybe, exactly what are you asking? What even is intelligence - that is a question I've never seen formally answered (and even if someone does, their definition may not match your intuitive feel for what it means and thus it is useless outside of the exact paper they defined it in)

Formal definitions aside, it isn't possible for "stupid" people to be good at chess. There also is no other animal or known alien that is good at chess. Thus being good at chess is a strong sign of an intelligent human.

We can't go the other way. There are plenty of humans generally known to be "intelligent" who are not good at chess. There is a lot more than intelligence needed to be good at chess (practice and study come to mind, there might be more).

While there are no known aliens that are good at chess, that doesn't preclude that we may discover them in the future. (not in your lifetime though - the speed of light is too slow for them to learn the rules of our chess and communicate back proof that they are good, no matter how intelligent they are)

Being good at most things is correlated with intelligence, including activities like music: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6682658/

The ability to plan and operate several moves ahead of one’s opponent has always suggested higher intelligence.

When applied to war we celebrate the general’s brilliance. When applied to economics we say they had excellent foresight. When applied to any human endeavor, except chess, the accomplishment is celebrated as a human achievement.

This is due to humans placing great value upon thinking and planning ahead. Only the intelligent exhibit this behavior.

I think Hikaru’s fans made him take an IQ or intelligence test a couple of years ago and it showed he wasn’t exactly a mastermind. He said at the time something along the lines that being good at chess shows you are intelligent only in that one domain of chess-type thinking, not general intelligence.

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.

(from Wikipedia)

Intelligence is multifactoral. Being good at chess was one aspect of intelligence in the complexity of Daniel's life, and in anyone's life.

Not proof (if there is any such thing for intelligence) but a very strong indicator, yes.

It definitely is, considering "good" to be a top 10 blitz player like Naroditsky was.

Not that long ago I would have said no, but I increasingly think that intelligence is mostly about the ability to learn. And chess, at a high level, requires a mixture of achieving an extremely high degree of unconscious competence working right alongside a high degree of conscious competence for things like opening prep. And most, if not all, high level chess players that have tried, in earnest, to do things outside of chess have excelled across a wide variety of fields.

But I think where people get confused is in the inverse. If you take a very smart person and he dedicates two years of his life to chess, all alongside training from some of the world's best, then he's still going to be, at best, a strong amateur at the end. In fact I know at least one instance where this exact experiment was tried. This is generally unlike other fields where such an effort would generally put you well into the realm of mastery.

But that's the unconscious competence part - chess takes many years of very serious training to even start to have it become 'natural' for you, and it's that point that your training journey begins all over again because suddenly things like opening preparation starts to become critical. So it can give the appearance that since seemingly smart people don't do particularly well at chess, while people like Magnus who has/had (daddyhood changes a lot...) a complete 'bro' personality, is arguably the strongest player of all time, it gives the impression that being smart must not be a prerequisite for success at chess.

The education system bored me a lot and made an effort to portray me as some kind of mentally disabled retard. It was rather interesting to me that successful career grown ups couldn't win a single game.

I wasn't interested in chess but I could see their entire plan unfold on the board. Unless they were actually good I didn't even try to win, in stead I let them unfold their plan into their own demise.

My winning streak ended when I got to play against the best kid from a different school. His was the biggest brain I have ever seen from the inside. He pretty much violated basic principles of the game in a way that still bothers me 35 years later.

The game was much to open to really look far ahead. The way one would play against a computer. His actual goal was to trade his knights and bishops for two pawns each!?!?! He pulled off 3 such trades. He carefully set up the trades and it made no fkn sense.

Then came a really long and slow pawn push that didn't allow me to trade my knights and bishops for more than a single pawn.

It took so many moves that he pretty much convinced me that 2 bishops and a knight are worth less than 5 points. I haven't seen a second game like it but I'm still 100% convinced.

If we define it as such (which it seems we have in some way) then yes.

nothing is, we're all stupid, thanks for the reminder

yes, it's a proof of human intelligence at chess. nothing more.

I'd say the opposite. Every time a guy crushes me, I flip the board over and call him a fuckwit.