What do chess champions see that we do not?

All chess champions talk a little if none about their abitity to see the game evolve and play the right move.

Anyone has a clue on what it is they see and foremost why they see it?

Why don't you post your games so we can help you improve? All the champs were once at your level! Nothing magical happened.

Just my take....

Better positional understanding and tactical vision, more accurate ways of putting together good plans for what needs to be done and creating problems for their opponent.

They see it because of experience, study, creative thinking, and logic.

They don't talk about it unless specifically asked, because for them it is second nature, they probably dont devote much active thought to that part of the game, rather than drawing from experience and what else Long Hair talks about. 

They have difficulties explaining their thought process with words because most of it has become subconcious and automated.

Can you accurately describe how you selected your words when writing your question ?

It's not a dark art; they see a chessboard and chess pieces, the same as everyone else blessed with the wonder of sight does. The difference is in the decision making and their understanding of consequences, for which there is no substitute for experience.

My work was in the technical field, yes I try to be as accurate and concise as I can possibly  be in a few words. Word selection is a difficult process as not everyone understands exactly the same thing from the same words. Obviously yes or no are clear cut answers.

But when opening a new post there are shades of grey that cannot be explained.

My question was meant as an analogy with the pro players thought process in chess : for them it's a kind of mother tongue, so they can speak it fluently (ie. find the strong moves), but have forgotten the intricacies of its grammar.

Basically, strong players see a lot of patterns on the chessboard that trigger ideas stored in their long-term memory. If the situation is simple, they can immediately find the answer to the question on the chessboard. If it's more complex, they need to calculate to check if their intuitive ideas work or not. While calculating, they meet other patterns and the process repeats itself. The patterns are their working vocabulary.

hicetnunc, as usual, speaks wisely.

Anyone who has become skillful at anything has practiced until much of the activity is unconscious.

Imagine trying to explain to someone who has never driven a car what exactly you are doing on a second-by-second basis when you start the car, back out of the garage, and begin navigating city traffic.

It's actually a very complex activity but most drivers breeze through it because they have reduced it to reflexes.

They are gifted. Something magical happened somewhere.

If you really want to know the answer to that, watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=136j3VtzZWs

Don't forget to pick up your jaw after watching it.

They see the memories of all of the thousands of games that they have played that you have not, and also the dozens of chess books they have studied.

Effortlessly being able to calculate at least 20 moves down the road with perfect visualization. 

They see possibility.

Prize money.

So pretty much its about making good performance effortless.

They don't talk about it becaue most of them really have no idea how it is they can do what they do.

See "Roots of Positional Understanding",Silman's  lessons in chess mentor.  He gives in each lesson a position and insight into what the GM sees in that position.

For example, "Black's queenside pawn majority is active, and his Knights are also well-placed. White has two Bishops, but the Bishop on g3 doesn't seem to be playing an active role. How can White get something going?" 

It is very instructive. 

Perhaps the most astonishing demonstration of raw chess power:

The best result in a simultaneous exhibition solely against grandmasters is former World Champion Garry Kasparov's performance against a Israeli team consisting of Boris Alterman, Alexander Huzman, Ilya Smirin, and Emil Sutovsky at Tel Aviv in 1998. Unusually for simultaneous exhibitions, half of the players played black and half played white. A second round was played 2 days later with colors reversed. Kasparov scored 7-1 against an all 2600+ rated team and considers it one of the peak performances of his career.

Kasparov was functioning on all the patterns he had diligently trained into his brain so that he could defeat several grandmasters using only a quarter of the time they spent.

That reminds me of Aronian spending 10 minutes to win this game:

Carlsen used 15 minutes on his clock to win this game: