Chess Objective

You are focused on your objective of mating opponent's King.  On the otherhand,  your opponent have the same exact objective, so, make sure your King is always well protected, as in well protected... if you really want to win.

Yes, the key is the strategy of learning how to bite off a lot, but not more than you can chew. Obviously, you need to checkmate, the opponent's King, but keep yours safe. However, how many turns will it take do checkmate them (or be checkmated yourself)? Many famous GM games involve them seeing the plans the opponent has, but intentionally allowing them to carry out some of their plan - rather than stopping it immediately. Why? Because then the opponent is basically "wasting" moves and this allows the player in control to make use of this extra time to launch a successful attack themselves. The strongest players identify threats and plans, but know how long they can successfully procrastinate dealing with them; those few precious tempi they save by not attending to the opponent's threats could be the key time amount they need to checkmate before they are checkmated! No one said chess, or other strategy games were always easy