A review about board game expertise: Is intelligence a determinant of expert performance?

Expertise studies try to understand whether people with superior performance in one area differ from novices or nonexperts. At the same time, it has been debated in expertise studies for years whether showing excellent performance in a domain is an innate talent or deliberate practice. Although the most critical determinant of expert performance is considered deliberate practice, when it comes to games including chess, compared to other expertise domains, explanations are primarily aimed at explaining the differences in performance level with intelligence. Therefore, this review is aimed to evaluate the place of cognitive skills associated with intelligence in behav-ioral studies conducted with various board game players in the context of expertise. As a result, it can be concluded that the determinant of performance in board game expertise should be con-sidered as the interaction of both, not just a cognitive skill such as intelligence or domain-specific deliberate practices.