Chess Training Won't Fix Your Working Memory, Sorry Kiddo

The Oasis Health Journal · Submitted July 26, 2026 · 4:00 PM EDT

By Ray 'Sleeves' Okafor · Edited by Mona Trell

Look, I love this customer. Come in every other Saturday, kid's about nine, wants to learn openings. And every time, the mom tells me the same thing: they doing this for his working memory. For his focus. For school. And every time I gotta bite my tongue because chess training won't fix your working memory, sorry kiddo, that ain't how the brain works, and I got two brand new reviews on my counter that say exactly that.

First one's a narrative review out of Cureus, just published in 2025, looking at board games across the whole lifespan. Pediatric populations, adults, elderly folk, mixed groups. Hundreds of studies. The other one's from Psychiatry Investigation, same year, focused entirely on Go, which if you don't know is chess's older meaner cousin with a bigger board and more ways to lose.

Both papers say the same thing in different words: yeah, you get better at the game. Course you do.

But that skill don't transfer.

What The Chess Training Working Memory Studies Actually Measured

The Go paper looked at professional players. We talking people who train for years, compete at national levels, got whole sections of their brain lighting up on an fMRI when they making moves. Researchers documented increased activation in the precuneus and the cerebellum during decision-making tasks. Real neuroplastic changes. Domain-specific neural adaptation, they called it.

Domain-specific.

Meaning it lives in the Go neighborhood and it stays there. Your brain gets extremely good at the thing you practiced, which in this case is evaluating board positions and planning multi-step sequences in a game with 361 possible opening moves. That skill does not pack up and move to algebra class. It don't help you remember grocery lists. It don't make you better at reading a map.

Now, the Go study did find some broader effects. In randomized controlled trials with older adults, researchers recorded improvements in mood, reductions in anxiety, even increases in something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is a protein that supports neuron health. And when they tested Go interventions in clinical populations, participants showed better executive function scores on the tests. But here's the thing: them tests was often game-adjacent tasks. Visuospatial reasoning. Pattern recognition. Stuff that looks like Go.

The board games review found similar patterns across dozens of studies. Elderly participants in nursing homes who played strategy board games regularly showed better engagement, more physical activity, some improvement in early diagnosis of cognitive impairment. Kids using games for health education retained more information than kids in standard lecture-based programs. Adults playing games designed for chronic disease management had better knowledge scores and sometimes better self-management behaviors.

But cognitive function transfer, the thing everybody actually wants, the reason the mom brings the kid in every Saturday? That ain't in the data.

Does Chess Training Won't Fix Your Working Memory Work For Anything?

Here's where I gotta be fair. The Cureus review documented real benefits, just not the ones people expect. In pediatric populations, board games helped with pre-operative anxiety. Helped kids learn about nutrition, chronic disease self-management, even emotional competency. The review noted emerging evidence for what they called attention-deficit hyperactivity disease (ADHD) symptom management, though that research is still early and the sample sizes small.

In mixed-age groups, games reduced risk factors for sexually transmitted infections, helped with alcohol and tobacco use reduction. In adults, the review found games supported preventive health education for conditions including osteoporosis and palliative care, improved psychiatric symptom scores, aided post-surgical rehabilitation.

These are real outcomes. People learned things. People felt better. Engagement went up, motivation went up, social connection went up.

But the thing about board games cognition research is that the short-term stuff is solid and the long-term stuff is mostly missing. The Cureus review straight-up said it: "While short-term benefits in knowledge, engagement, and psychosocial outcomes are well documented, evidence for sustained clinical impact is limited."

Translation: we know games can teach you information and make you feel less lonely while you playing them. We do not know if that lasts once you put the box back on the shelf.

Chess Training Won't Fix Your Working Memory, Sorry Kiddo Research Says Play Anyway

Now look, I ain't trying to talk nobody out of chess. I sell chess sets. I teach openings. I love this game and I been playing it since I was younger than that nine-year-old who comes in here every other week.

But I also read the studies, and the studies say: chess makes you good at chess. Go makes you good at Go. Board games in general make you better at the specific skills that game requires, and sometimes they make you happier or less anxious while you playing them, and that is worth something all by itself.

The Go study found that professional players show "domain-specific neural adaptations." The board games review found that games are "safe, versatile, and culturally adaptable tools" with well-documented effects on engagement and psychosocial well-being. Both reviews called for more rigorous long-term studies.

What they did not find, in hundreds of pages of research, is evidence that chess instruction transfers to math scores. Or that training working memory inside a game context improves working memory outside that context. The neural changes are real. The benefits are real. The transfer is not.

So when the mom comes back in two weeks and asks me if we got any harder puzzles because the kid's doing so good and she real excited about what this gonna do for his report card, I'm gonna sell her the puzzles. And then I'm gonna tell her the truth, which is that her kid's gonna get better at chess, and better at talking to the other kids who play chess, and maybe better at sitting still for an hour without checking his phone, and all three of them things are good.

But his science grade? That's between him and the science teacher. The board ain't got nothing to do with it.

This article is education and reporting on published research. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Talk to your own clinician about your own situation.

Sources

1. A Narrative Review of the Benefits of Board Games in Health — Cureus (2025).
2. Go and the Brain: Cognitive and Neural Impacts of Training — Psychiatry investigation (2025).