By playing often you pick up common patterns (e.g. look out for bishops on long diagonals) and develop habits of checking for things like undefended pieces.
There are some good "checklists" that let you know what good players are thinking about and what you may be doing wrong or missing (even very good players like Kotov's book Think Like a Grandmaster)... but people don't play chess with a ridged checklist or use a certain way to scan the board every time, after you play often enough it becomes habitual to check for these things. In real game planning your next move is more free form than some lists and methods suggest.
That said, I suppose one way would be to start with queens and work down, rooks, bishops, knights, and for each scan their attack path for an opposing piece. In a real game you don't need to re-check every piece every time, mostly it's enough to notice the pieces that move... just remember pieces that move sometimes uncover an attack of the rook or bishop behind them.
Hello chess.com community,
I'm just starting to dabble in chess again after a long hiatus. I recently bought "Fritz for Fun 13". It has some nice training features including one I'm using now that chooses at random a position from a database of 1.5 million games or so and then challenges you to find all pieces that can be taken (legally) within a minute.
Now it has become clear to me that there must be some systematic way to go about examining the board. Do you do it by rank or file, diagonals or another way entirely? And is there a way to get back to scanning the board, in case some positon/threat/opportunity/etc presents itself and you get derailed?
Thanks!