Things that Yoram knows: Is chess a proof of male superiority and Jewish genius?

The section will deal with two questions about the game of kings: Is the presence of many Jews at the top of chess a proof of the famous Jewish genius and is male dominance proof of our intellectual superiority over our female partners?

The section will deal with two questions about the game of kings: Is the presence of many Jews at the top of chess a proof of the famous Jewish genius and is male dominance proof of our intellectual superiority over our female partners?

Well, the table doesn't lie, we Jews star at the top of chess: from the time of the first world champion Wilhelm Steinitz and his successor Emmanuel Lasker through Michael Botvinik and Michael Tal to half-Jews like Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov, our people were generously represented among the rabbis. From the very beginning of competitive chess, theories have appeared linking the Jewish character, the Jewish genius and even the Jewish religion to chess success. Wilhelm Steinitz himself claimed that the reason for Jewish success in chess is patience and an easy-going nature. Unfortunately, Steinitz passed away in 1900 and did not get to see his people with great patience and good character in their homeland. The origin of the myth about the Jewish "chess genius" lies in the flourishing of Jewish chess players from Russia who conquered world chess.

In 1918, the French chess player Alphonse Goetz wrote a book called "The Parallel Progress of Chess and Civilization" in which he expressed admiration for the high proportion of Jews among chess players and the Jewish contribution to the game. The theoretical progress in chess, achieved in no small part thanks to Steinitz who promoted chess from a game based on tactical tricks to a science based on positional analysis, is presented together with Jewish success in science and business. Even the success of the Zionist movement in the Balfour Declaration is described as a brilliant move on the way to another Jewish match. Kingdom of Israel .. I can foresee, and not in the distant future, the big world championship tournament taking place in Jerusalem".

If the Jewish mastery of chess is surprising, then the male success in a field that does not require muscles is apparently even more amazing. The top of world chess has always been dominated by men.

In view of the data here, there is apparently no doubt that chess proves the superiority of our minds, the Jewish men compared to the foolish Gentiles and gullible women.

But, what to do, a little deeper examination undermines this confidence. A key question is: does chess express intelligence? Is it true that the foundation of the chess master's success is a quick mind that is able to calculate more moves than the minds of ordinary mortals? It is told about a chess champion who was asked how many moves he was looking ahead in the game and answered "only one - the right move". Indeed, studies have shown that chess masters do not calculate more possible situations in a given period of time and their advantage over mediocre players is their ability to identify, sometimes thanks to theoretical knowledge and often based on intuition, priority positions and thus focus on testing a small number of moves that have real potential. The success of computer programs to beat world champions was achieved after the failure of chess programs that focused on testing an astronomical number of possible ramifications. The machines won when the programmers moved to imparting "chess intuition" to the software and later to building machines that create this intuition for themselves. The problem with such chess intuition is its specificity. It is difficult to utilize intuition focused on leg chains or center bed control for real-world problems. Human intelligence is multifaceted and for chess success, psychological research shows, a specific component of it is needed: spatial perception. The chess player needs the kind of intelligence required of a midfielder in a soccer team who is required to read the picture of the game and launch an attack Don't fall into a different format. Other components of intelligence: imagination, verbal ability and creativity are not essential to success in chess. Chess players are favorite laboratory rabbits for psychologists because it is easy to link traits tested in research to the "fitness meter" which is a numerical score that expresses the chess player's success in tournaments: professional players have a fitness meter of over 2,000 and the highest level of fitness achieved by a person was 2882 (a score reached by a champion the world Magnus Carlsen in 2014). For comparison, the highest fitness meter achieved by a female chess player is 2735 - number 53 in the table. As early as 1925, the Russian psychologist Dzhakov tested chess players and was surprised to find that their intellectual abilities did not exceed the average by much, in the past century many more observations confirmed his findings. Psychological tests have shown that good chess players tend to be aggressive and suspicious and are, distinctly, less sociable than master chess players or mediocre chess players. Spatial perception, aggressiveness and suspicion are qualities that the sex hormone testosterone promotes in us, the men. The same hormone that perfects spatial perception so that we can get out of a tight parking lot without body damage (to later crash while driving aggressively on the highway) also helps us identify opportunities and dangers on the board and also gives us the motivation to hit the opponent. The development of chess software enables a more in-depth examination of the gender gap in chess, software whose level surpasses any human player can be used to assess the quality of chess moves and compare the performance of men and women. A very broad study analyzed millions of moves from about 80,000 tournament chess games. The quality of the mid-game moves - the stage where the player is required to be cunning and original was tested using software whose level of play is equivalent to a fitness meter score of 3,100 (much higher than any human player). It turns out that the quality of play of male players was not affected by the gender of the opponent, but women played better against women than against men. The results of the analysis showed that a chess player playing against a man "loses" in terms of the quality of the journeys about 30 points in her fitness meter compared to playing against a woman. The researchers offer several explanations for the strange phenomenon, one of which links the decrease in performance to the need to face a negative stereotype. This phenomenon of a stereotype that acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy has also been observed in other fields and is probably due to over-activation of the emotional function of the brain, which is accompanied by a decrease in "working memory" performance, that is, the ability to concentrate and store information in short-term memory. In this chess game memory is essential to calculate different outcomes following each move. Most chess games at the highest levels are not decided by chess but by surrender in the face of a situation perceived as hopeless. It was found that male players will surrender in 3-4 trips earlier to a man than to a woman when their situation is inferior, which means that the female player in such games has more chance of losing a promising advantage than the man.   

But there are those who rule out at all or almost at all the intellectual or emotional explanations. Chess players at the highest levels are exceptional individuals among a very defined population: people who chose at a young age to dedicate their lives to moving pieces on a checkered board. The more players there are, the greater the chance of finding a champion among them. A study that examined the distribution of ability among the top 100 chess players and the top 100 female chess players in Germany revealed that 96% of the gender gap in chess can be explained by the numerical advantage of men among all players.

Reinforcement of this assumption of quantity becoming quality can be found in examining the chess ability of the chosen people. It is enough to see the great difference between the chess champions that our ancestors produced in Eastern Europe and the ability of their descendants to understand the importance of culture in the emergence of chess champions. Among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, chess occupied a place similar to that occupied by soccer in South America. The Yiddish newspaper of the city of Lodz boasted a chess column written by Akiva Rubinstein, one of the greatest players of the early 20th century (imagine Messi writing a football commentary column for a local in Netanya...). The checkered board was an integral part of every club or gathering, tourists and journalists who described the daily life in Jewish towns and neighborhoods report chess games on almost every street corner and cafe. In such an atmosphere were found the talented who devoted the endless practice time required at least as much as the talent.

Still, studies show that although success in chess does not necessarily indicate high intelligence, the game of chess develops the intelligence of the player even if this is not expressed in success in competitive chess. Studies examining student achievements have shown that engaging in chess as a hobby develops spatial perception, mathematical and logical ability and school achievements. It is possible that it was not the Jewish genius that caused our success in chess but rather the chess games helped to develop the Jewish genius.

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