Six thousand chess players took part in a beauty contest

Researchers from the University of Kassel ran a Beauty Contest experiment among visitors of the ChessBase website. Compared to previous versions of the game run on the internet the chess players don't seem particularly smarter than other types of players (although drawing any rockhard conclusions from comparing between completely different experiments is a bit pointless). The most interesting part of the results is that better chess players - as identified by a higher ELO rating - pick lower, better numbers, although the effect is not particularly big and the grandmasters (n=28) who participated didn't seem to do better than the rest at all.