Does chess enhance cognitive abilities? Some texts advise playing chess with children and mature people. Should I take them seriously, and why should chess boost intellect?
For instance, I would like to be able to read and understand technical texts quickly. Should I learn playing chess for this? In this text, for instance, they hype all kinds of advantages gained from chess, but they raise the meaningful questions at the end:

• Is there anything else besides playing chess that these GMs can be experts at?
• Granting these GMs were already genius by birth, is it safe to infer that playing chess has enhanced their overall intellect?

In the course of trolling, they conclude, &quot;Go ahead and grab a chess board.&quot; This leaves me pondering if the effect they hyped indeed exists.
Giovanni Sala was concerned by this same question, so he did a meta-analysis of 24 studies in "Beyond the 64 Squares: Does Chess Instruction Enhance Children’s Academic and Cognitive Skills? A Meta-Analysis" and found that there was still a lot of doubt in the results. Specifically, in all the papers, he never found the control group was reasonable. Of course children who played chess rather than doing nothing performed better at various tasks, as can be seen in "Enhancing Creativity in Children by Imparting Chess Training". But what about regular instruction or playing other games?

Consequently, he followed his meta-analysis up with a randomized plucebo controlled trial focused in mathematical cognitive skills in "Does Chess Instruction Enhance Mathematical Ability in Children? A Three-Group Design to Control for Placebo Effects" and found that the effect of chess, when compared to actual mathematics instruction (Control), was meaningless as shown in the tables below. However, it did surpass the game Go in transfer learning outcomes.





As he concluded at his talk at the CogSci 2016 conference (where all the papers I cited come from) which I attended, far transfer-learning is really hard. To improve skills in certain domains, it is better to study that domain than to hope a marginally related activity will grant insight. To make studying that domain easier, new materials need to be developed rather than searching for new related activities.

Note: This area is still under active research, as discussed in "The Effects of Chess Instruction on Pupils' Cognitive and Academic Skills: State of the Art and Theoretical Challenges"