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I agree with Fergus, you don´t need to enjoy Chess for playing it to get
smarter, but it can help. Chess practice is a mental exercise, but at
first I disagree it is as other mental activities, the mental proccess
playing a game, with the planning, strategy and evaluation subjects
involved, can help to augment your IQ by non trivial reasons, and it is a
research subject, although other metal activities can also help to make
you 'smarter' too, depending on the 'smarter' definition, and in this
topic I am not specialist, so I don´t want to add much more in a diletant
posture. Chess is a finite game of perfect information, so there is an
optimal strategy and the result under optimal strategy exists. Very
probably, Chess is a draw, and with very lowest probability White wins,
but it is not possible, to the state-of-art, determine the result under
optimal stategy, due the combinatorics complexity. nxn Chess is NP-hard,
so, in principle, a family of games with previously undetermined board
sizes are out the scope of analysis, but 8x8 Chess has a result.
Nevertheless, the result is far from easy to be determined, due the game
complexity, and this game, as many other games here, are complex enough
for give the player a special mental exercise: plan the future under very
complex strategies and tactics, and it can be the clever on the action of
the game practice in making you smarter: in each step you need avaluate
your move and avoid commit errors, and it can be used for many situations
in the real world and life. Perhaps the mental proccess in Chess prepares
the brain for many similar situations in the real life.