P. S. If this topic belongs in the Chess Players section, I hope an admin can move this over there...
"I know I am not on form when the best move is not the one that first comes to my mind."
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I’ve heard that pattern recognition is a lot of how gm’s see far ahead - it could even be multiple patterns together that they use to see that, for example after a series of trades they will have a winning endgame due to having the right bishop for their pawn, plus having distant opposition on the enemy king
@twhite0622:
Yeah, I get ya. GM @Gserper recently wrote an article on pattern recognition that the chess geniuses achieve with greater ease than others...
Still, it tells us nothing about how they keep in touch with their intuitions. From what I've witnessed by reading and watching post-game interviews with super GMs, they often make decisions on the basis of how they feel about a particular position. Sure, it's a very polished feel, but a feel nevertheless. It's not that they don't make exact calculations, it's that they steer clear of certain continuations based on some vague-ish impression that the envisioned position (a certain number of moves down the road) instills in them. They never explain how they obtained such a sense and how they justify it.
I think that many of us just assume that after ploughing through bajillions of various games and exercises, it just finds the right place in our subconscious; but is it all really so? How do vastly different training methods lead to similar results, and more importantly - what are they, exactly?
This supposed quote by Petrosian has me intrigued. It sounds similar to Capa's sentence about himself always seeing a single - but correct! - move ahead; yet, it seems to comment on Iron Tigran's own intuition, and it doesn't pretend that further calculation from the initial best move isn't required, either! The way I see it, Petrosian had all of Capablanca's fundamental skills (and possibly more) applied to a far more developed kind of chess, but that's not exactly my point here; instead, I want to pose the following question:
How does one hone their intuition to (virtually) always choose the best move to calculate from, prior to knowing the (accurate) final results of those calculations?
Or, to put it in a different way, by what method can the feel for picking the most fruitful (trees of) variations be obtained?
This shouldn't only include sensing the way to the clear-cut and fully comprehensible positional destinations (meaning that, for example, if an unclear position has more fighting potential than its clear alternative, it could be preferrable from a competitive perspective etc.), but it could nevertheless.
Since we know that Petrosian excelled at very accurate tactical calculations, both when attacking and defending (though defence was his specialty, precisely because he was so accurate), it makes sense to me that this is what he was talking about. No way he didn't have much to calculate; instead, he just intuitively streamlined it anyway!
So, how can us mere mortals train our intuition to succeed in this? It especially interests me because due to time constraints, I personally only play rapid games, so having a splendid intuition would be a most valuable asset in my potential skillset.