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.
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