How chess masters think.

If you would visit a game being played by a grandmaster you would see a lot of emotions. In simple periods of the chess game the grandmaster would go into a lot of concentration. At other times moves may come quickly due to a rehearsed plan. Maybe you would think that the grandmaster moving his rook and letting the queen take it would be a blunder but actually in the end it leads to a brilliant checkmate. This may be why.

Grandmasters have amazing minds and probably very high IQs so they will be able to recall the position in previous games and maybe the same concepts could apply to the game being played. It especially applies to the most basic attacking formations around the opponents king, or the enemy king as I like to call it.

It is clear then that chess analysis is a mixture of calculation of individual moves and pattern recognition.

Effectively all chess players think this way. However the ratio between these 2 methods of thought is different for players of different strengths. 

And that is why grandmasters are so good.