Autistic spectrum disorder and chess ability

Which current grandmasters have ASD? A bit of it is probably good for chess - is this why there are fewer female players at all levels? Your views please!

I think Ivanchuk

ASD and chess ability--> not likely related

There are fewer females players at all levels, but the biggest gap is in the big (supertop) level, this is something that happens in other disciplines like physics, maths and that kind of stuff.

I'm not an expert, but I don't think Autism and chess have any correlation. If you're talking about savants, then they typically have genius like qualities in a single area (like memory, drawing, division, etc.); however, they pay for it dearly in being severely mentally impaired in other areas. I think with chess, there are too many factors that one needs to be great at. I would love to see a documented case of a chess savant though....I just doubt it.

but the paradox in this case is the fact they have a brilliant ability despite of having severe other problems. It is not like you go to a shop with money to spend and decide what abilities do you want to have and you waste a lot in someone and thus will have some other defficiences. Nature is more unfair and gives many to some and is short with others

not talking about savants but "odd" people! Although Mikhail Tal couldn't, apparantly, pack a suitcase! I think, actually, the GM's in the Candidates, now we're seeing them at press conferences, are mostly quite personable. Svidler, Aronian and Gelfand all come across well. john Nunn on the commentary has an Asperger's sense of humour, or lack of it. He said something actually hilariously funny without meaning to and didn't get it himself! "Last time I played Magnus Carlsen as black I ended up in hospital"

Yes there is a relation, with ASD (asberger's) and high level proformance in any mental field. Often it will manafest itself in music/math, but in will show up other places also. Because the lower forms are high functioning and therefor hard to diagnose it is not easy to give exact numbers, but people with some level of ASD will always have areas of greater weaknessess and greater stregnths when compared to the norm

Seeing them in a single setting makes it hard to tell also, as some Asperger's people will have less social skills in private and others will have less social skills in public.

well, it works more or less the other way round the diagnosis of Asperger excludes mental retardation. So by the very definition no Asperger people will show low intelligence. But this is a taxonomic question and doesn't provide an explanation of anything, and in fact this whole branch of medicine is weak assessed, non specific and they hardly know the biological causes for all this disorders, so they just collect stamps, watch out the stamps to find similar patterns, and then put them into different boxes which are called with different names.

I think there is always one thing very wrong with labeling people using sicknesses: the people described are not sick themselves, hence the label is incorrect. In the Netherlands there are nowadays many children labeled with ADHD. In my time (I am 48), there were none. The difference is much too big, that can not have its cause anymore in the sickness of the person. No, sickness is in the eye of the beholder.

Furthermore do I agree with pdela that many definitions are not well developed and should not be used lightly if used at all. I have studied psychology for some years and I had to study DSM II at that time. It was used for diagnosis. If you would take a look at the current standard (V is coming) then will you see that there are major shifts in definitions and the like. That field of knowledge is still at its very beginning and the big differences between those versions should be an implicit warning not using those labels lightly.

If you can be a top chess player for so many years like Ivanchuk, then are you a healthy person. You are able to manage your life in some way and perform at a very high level at the same time. What more do you need to know that someone is mentally strong and in one or the other way healthy?

Being sick implies being a big trouble for yourself or others. Don't take those words lightly. They describe something heavy. And why should it be sick if you can play chess so good? Is Messi sick, because he is so good at football? Or was Michael Jordan sick? In slang maybe, not in real life.

Having a disorder is different than being sick, having a disorder is not always a bad thing

in my local chess circuit in my city, there is a little boy, can't be a day more than 14. i have never seen him speak. he only plays. when i first saw him about a year ago, his rating was 1800 FIDE. A few months later he was 2080. Now he is 2290. I think he is autistic. This was about 3 months ago, maybe he is now 2300+

i just checked. he is 14 years. his FIDE is 2320 and he is an FM now.

I have many autistic tendencies my self and many very intelligent people do seem weird to most other people. Akiba Rubinstein was pagued by mental illness and probably would have given Capablanca a hard time if he had been more mentally stable. 

I'm on the spectrum and i can say chess did come very natural i was about 1400 after a few months and when i obsessed my self with chess a year i went from 1500-2100 its not related to the disorder its the obsessive part that makes someone with autism good at something (a year of learning something with autistic qualities can be like 3 years of learning something for a "normal person" because the amount of hours immersed or consumed with something and i feel is attributed to "autistic abilities" all the time) but the problem we face is emotional control, also irregular sleep schedules, stomach issues etc that can hinder our performance at chess. I also personally battle with the need of feeding my aesthetic beauty need, for example i can see lines that i know are +.50 grinder type positions and can play those and know its what a GM would do but i rather go for wild and crazy combinations that would be -.30 -.8 but have some element of soundness and cant help myself so it really has capped my strength. I work on it and can hardly help myself over the board when the situations arise. Also the lack of emotional control can easily mentally hijack us , making it hard for our brains to work in high pressure situation which i dont think is too different from "normal" people but its extremely challenging. <--My 2 cents as someone being diagnosed on the spectrum and who learned to assimilate well. 

I'm super late here, and I imagine no one will read this. However, I am somewhat of an expert is ASD, and I think the reason some people with autism excel in specific areas is because they tend to obsess about that specific area. I don't know if this is true, but I would imagine that every overly successful person is or was obsessed with that thing at some point in their life. I've personally worked with hundreds of individuals with ASD, and I've only seen a handful that even had any interest in chess with maybe one or two being a good enough player to challenge me (roughly 1600 on chess.com, not calling myself good). I just think that in order to excel in something, you have to have some level of obsession, and people with autism are typically very good at obsessing. I've seen this in a lot of other areas. Music, other forms of art, and video games (both writing and playing) tended to be the more common obsessions that I saw. Also, not every person with autism has an obsession that they're overly good at. If I had to guess based on my personal experience, it would be around 30-40% of the people I worked with had a specific obsession that they practiced until I stopped being able to understand their progress.

 Hi @pdve do you know the name of this 14 year old from 2013 with autism? He would be around 22 now and I'd be interested to see how he has progressed since childhood!

There probably is a correlation.