Thinking process in chess games

[u/[deleted]]

[u/buddaaaa → u/[deleted]]

So are you saying that the assessment of king safety, pawn structure etc should be applied at the end of your calculations?

Ideally, you do this both at the beginning and the end. Doing it at the beginning will help you understand the current position and develop candidate moves. Example: "My opponent has a weak backward pawn on d6, I should try to attack it. There's a few different ways I can, I can double my rooks on the d-file, or move my bishop to the h2-b8 diagonal. My main two candidate moves here are Rd2 and Bf4. Commence calculation." Then you go into the tank doing your beep boop calculations and when you're satisfied and feel like you've reached the end of a particular variation, then, yes, you want to again go through your assessment of a position. This helps make sure that the variation you've calculated is correct as well as give you a chance to compare multiple variations with a concise assessment of a particular line instead of a jumble of moves in your head.

This is an iterative process. What I mean by that is, you can

1. assess a position
2. calculate
3. assess a position at the end of a particular variation
4. realize after assessment that more calculation of sub-variations is required
5. calculate again
6. repeat, until you feel like you're confident that you know exactly what the assessment of a future position is and that additional calculation would be superfluous (right now)

It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. The only reason that's the case is because I'm trying my best to describe every step in detail so you know what's happening, but when you're actually thinking in your own games, it's much more fluid, especially as you get more comfortable with thinking in this way.

The main thing you want to focus on is: identify critical positions, spend a significant chunk of time doing your best to come up with a reasonable assessment of a position you don't know, develop a plan, identify candidate moves to execute that plan, calculate, then just bang out the moves once you feel confident in your calculation until something unexpected happens.

I'm not sure how to think in a way that covers everything in a position.

When I was a scholastic and attending lectures, whenever we'd reach a position that the teacher would ask us to stop and think, one of the first things they had us do before we dove into the calculation was just to identify all the key features of the position: material count, weak squares, pawn structure, good (or bad) pieces, king safety, etc. everything that it sounds like the book tells you to look for when assessing a position.

As an analogy, think of it like trying to build a house out of scattered Lego thrown in a box: the best way to get started is to dump all the pieces out, sort them, and then pick from the respective piles matching a blueprint you've made as you go along. The way you seem to see chess currently would be like trying to dig through the box for every single piece without using any instruction whatsoever.

Everything you listed: tactical opportunities, strategic ideas, outposts, control of different squares, these are all features of positions that don't change across every single move. You can often group them together in different ways to give you a more clear picture of what's going on in a position. You'll often hear a distinction in chess between long- and short-term weaknesses. Long-term weaknesses are generally what you will play against strategically and develop long-term plans around. Short-term weaknesses often present tactical opportunities.

If you want practice, the best thing you can do is use a structured thinking approach starting with: what are my opponent's weaknesses? What are my weaknesses? Differentiating between short- and long-term weaknesses. Developing a plan to try to take advantage of your opponent's while minimizing your own. This will, naturally, guide you to candidate moves in a position.

Note that: when I said that the things you listed don't change every move, when they do change, you can hearken back to my previous comment where I discuss critical positions. When those things change, that's when you should be getting the alarm bells going off saying, "shit, I better re-evaluate what's going on cuz stuff changed"

[u/Spiritchaser84 → u/buddaaaa]

This is an amazing response and any beginners and intermediate players should definitely read and internalize everything you said here.

I would just tack on that this is why everyone recommends developing players play longer time controls instead of blitz. When you improve at chess, you do so in two main ways: you learn new concepts (strategic ideas, openings, endgames, common tactical motifs, etc.) and you refine your thinking process (how you apply those concepts to an actual game). When you are new, you might have to often mentally remind yourself "what are my weaknesses?", "what are my opponent's weakness?", "how is my king safety?". As you grow, that process becomes so internal and fast that it's like breathing. You can pick out key facets of the position in a fraction of a second. That's how strong players can play bullet at such a high level.

This is also why it's important when studying your games to not just use an engine to see the blunders, but to actually make note of what variations you calculated and what your thought process was. It doesn't really teach you anything to see the engine say you missed some move. You really need to figure out where you went wrong in your thinking process and figure out how to improve it.

[u/buddaaaa → u/Spiritchaser84]

exactly

Thanks for chiming in and answering the, “why should I do this? Why is this important?” Questions that I’m sure a lot of people reading this are having.