Chess & Intelligence: Debunking the Myth

You tell yourself that if you put the youngest in there, he might end up as a Major at Polytechnique, a Nobel Prize winner… or a star of the courts. This is the magic equation anchored in our collective unconscious: chess = superior intelligence.

In France, National Education, eyes shining with hope, rushed into the breach with the massive system “ Chess Class“. The idea? The chessboard would be a “gymnasium of the mind” which would inflate math grades through simple neuronal contagion.

Except… science has decided, and it’s not as glam as Netflix. We delved into the meta-analyses, the merciless British studies and the feedback from our teachers. Spoiler: the “magic transfer” to math is a myth. But the game has a much more surprising superpower. We explain everything to you.

No, it doesn’t (necessarily) make you better at math

For a long time, we lived on a cloud. The famous thesis by Michel Noir (2002) promised us gains of +32% in logic and +50% in concentration. The absolute dream.

But since then, Anglo-Saxon researchers (notably the Education Endowment Foundation in 2016 and the Sala & Gobet duo) have played the killjoy with massive and rigorous studies on more than 4,000 students. The verdict is cruel:

• Impact on math grades? Null. Zero. Nada.
• Impact on science? Idem.

This is what experts call the failure of “far transfer”. The brain is a great partitioner. Becoming a tactical killer on the e4 square makes you… an e4 square expert. Not an expert in differential equations. Replacing an hour of math with an hour of chess does not increase the math average (it makes sense, when you think about it).

The transfer myth

The French exception

So, are we throwing out the chessboard with the bathwater? Certainly not! This is where the French approach becomes clever. Rather than chasing IQ points, the program Chess Class (launched in 2022 with the FFE) aims for something else: “soft skills” and cooperation.

The figures for 2025 are dizzying: there are now more than 160,000 students initiated each year by 8,000 teachers. But the most reassuring (and most incredible) figure revealed by the researcher Yves Leal is elsewhere: 87% of committed teachers know very little, if at all, about the game! You don’t have to be Garry Kasparov to run the class. The system is designed for them: the teacher is no longer the vertical “knower”, but a facilitator who sometimes learns with his students.

And in terms of atmosphere, the feedback from the field is unanimous:

• Silence, we play: 54% of teachers note a significant reduction in noise in class.
• Classroom management: The chessboard calms the excited people in the jar. You can’t think while screaming.
• Learning to inhibit: This is the Holy Grail of neuroscience. The “piece touched, piece played” rule forces the child to Stop his hand, to inhibit his impulse to think. And that is the key skill for success in school (and in… life?).

Revenge of the Dunces (and the importance of the “bridge”)

The best part of this story? This is the “Revelation” effect. In working-class neighborhoods, kids who are angry with writing or language turn out to be formidable strategists.

For what ? Because activity is above all visual-spatial. As Yves Léal points out in his analysis for The Conversationthe game allows you to bypass the “linguistic code”. For a “dys” or allophone student, it is a liberation: the barrier of words falls, only pure logic and the manipulation of pieces count. Here we touch on a form ofintegral education which connects body and mind. The sanction is immediate and fair: you make a mistake, you lose a piece. No “customer head”.

The secret to making it work? The teacher must do the “bridge” (bridging). It’s not enough to play. The teacher should say: “Did you see how you checked before moving your Lady? Do exactly the same thing for your dictation. » Without this explicit sentence, the debrief, the skill remains stuck on the board.

An essential detour

Playing chess won’t turn your child into a human calculator. It’s a myth. But it’s a great educational detour. We go through play, pleasure and culture to learn to sit down, to respect others, to manage the frustration of defeat and to think before acting.

And frankly, in an era where attention is more volatile than Bitcoin, managing to get thirty kids to concentrate for an hour on 64 boxes is already a form of magic, right?

Join our WhatsApp channel