Eli5: how does a pro chess player see 10+moves ahead? What does that look like?
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Chess positions often only have 1 good move. For example if someone captures your piece your only option is to re-capture: capture the piece that just captured your piece.
Another example might be that if your opponent puts your king in check there might be only one way to get out of check that doesn’t result in loss of a piece or checkmate.
As a result, it’s often possible to force your opponent to make a sequence of moves, because you can see logically that they only have one good response to each of your moves. Sometimes these sequences can get very long.
For starters, they aren’t literally envisioning every possible position of the table. There’s more of those than there are atoms in the planet. They are only thinking “What are my opponent’s most likely next moves.” They think of two or three of the best possibilities, and think of what response they would play for each. This makes the math more manageable for a savant level mind. Then keeping track of what move they would make in response to each only adds one thing to remember, since they know what they will play.
They don’t play out every single path to the end, either. They might get three moves in and not like the possibilities, so they ditch the move that leads down that path. Only the final candidate moves are they thinking many turns out.
Finally, their ability to predict many turns out is not as reliable as a couple turns out, so they are constantly reassessing those predicted positions as they approach them.
My son is a competitive player. He ‘sees’ moves ahead, but much of it is memorized rotes of what the best move would be given particular situations. I will open with different moves and he will straight up say, “Dad, that’s the blah-blah opening,” and then proceed to out play me for the next 5-10 moves since there are ideal moves to make and he has them in his mind. When it goes into the fuzzy realm is when you get to a handful of pieces and then you are aiming for a move for those pieces to set you up where you can mate.
There’s 3 things people could say when they mean this:
1. It is the opening, and they have memorized 10+ moves deep in the relevant variations. This is relatively easy because both players have memorized stuff, and if the opponent goes off script they’ll be punished. Like if you sacrifice your queen I wouldn’t have “seen” that, but I’d still say I see 10 moves deep because I know I’m winning there without even thinking.
2. It is an endgame, or some other forced combination. So the possibilities don’t branch very far.
3. They are exaggerating to impress the non-chess player 🙂
In most cases, players are looking 2-4 moves ahead. They are mentally tuning out branches (e.g. that move loses the queen so we don’t need to think further).
Players also memorize certain patterns that recur. Like if I see your pawn is 6 moves from the end of the board and mine is 5 moves, I can easily “see” 6 moves deep (we both push our pawns for 5 moves and then i arrange my queen to capture your pawn exactly as it becomes queen). In many situations we can string such sequences together which effectively lets me consider how the board will look 10 moves away.
Finally, players make moves that will matter in 10+ moves, but they might not know exactly how. For example, if I force you to move a pawn on the right side of the board, at some point your king will probably be hiding behind that pawn–since it moved that will then be a weak point.
In addition to the good answers already received, openings are special. The pieces always start in the same position. (Well, there are variants of chess where the starting positions are randomized within certain guidelines to mix things up, but I assume you’re talking about normal chess in this question).
So given that you know where the pieces start, there are only so many “first moves” and “second moves” and so on. There’s a lot of research into chess openings (heck, I’m barely a decent amateur and I have a book of openings on my bookshelf from back in days when we tended to print things out on flattened dead trees). Pro chess players study these openings and memorize them to various degrees. Each player is likely to have favorite openings that they’ve memorized to greater depth. And if they know who their opponent will be, they may analyze their opponent’s tendencies and memorize some openings they’re likely to encounter to a greater depth (or at least a fresher recall) than they normally would.
So, a pro chess player can get what would feel to you or me like pretty far into the game before they really have to start “seeing ahead”.
Endings are similar. There are more possibilities, because a lot happens in the midgame and the pieces can end up in a lot of places. But once there are only a certain number of pieces on the board, a pro chess player can do a good job of figuring out all the possibilities, because there are only so many left. And they’ve seen a lot of chess, so they can do a lot with just pattern recall.
The midgame is really where your question lies (and where the other answers you’ve received matter most). I just wanted to mention the beginning and the end of the game as special cases.
1. Apart from openings, players usually figure out which moves seem the best, relatively to the position or also the previous move.
2. There are things called tactics: with training and experience, it becomes easier to recognize certain patterns and sequence of moves with breaking it down everytime during a game.
3. Otherwise, when you “calculate” moves, its really about “what ifs”. If this x move then what happens next? And you branch out from here. This is obviously very draining and difficult, thats why it takes a lot of time.
This is when training tactics, scenarios, endgames, concepts etc can help you break down and decide which moves are the best without having to go through every scenario. Things like passed pawn, doubled pawns, pins, analyzing square colors, etc
Have you ever played tic tac toe? “If I put my cross here, he’ll put his there and I can’t make a line, if I put my cross here, he can put his here or there… if he puts it there I can put my next one here, if not, I have to put mine here or he wins…”
It’s like that, just more complex.
If I put 3 blocks down in front of you, can you just immediately “see” that there are 3 blocks, or do you have to count? What about 4 blocks? What about 10? Most 5 year olds can look at 3 blocks and just instantly know that it’s 3 without even counting. Just like most beginner chess players could look at one board position and say “ok, the knight could take the bishop”. A chess master is like someone who could look at 13 blocks and just “know” it’s 13 blocks. But in terms of chess moves. Then someone tries to explain it as “counting 10+ blocks ahead!” despite the fact that in a chess master’s mind there was never any counting.
I used to play chess for england junior team as a kid, as many desceibed it is a case of ‘if i do this, how could my opponent respond?’ That will give you some variation of likely options. In order to evaluate what is most likely, you will keep on going down each of the available alternatives repeating the process up until you get some level of certainty that the line of moves you are hypothesizing will end positively for the opponent, in which case you need to re-evaluate the move you are considering- or if you are happy that all possibilities you can see will carry out in your favour, you make the move.
Generally as an exanple, if i was thinking 1 move ahead i would think “of i do x and put him in check, he can move his king, or block the check with a knight or rook- do any of those end in a disadvantage for me?” If not, make the move. 2 moves ahead would be considering your next move and his next response, asking the same question. All the way up to 10 in your question. This does get more complex if there multiple possible moves you can foresee the opponent making, as there can be countless lines to analyse- through game knowledge and good chess analytic skill good players can reduce the number of moves they feel the opponent may make, since they can easily dismiss them as not helpful or such.
One more thing to add is a concept called “forced moves”. If I check your king, your choices are to defend it by moving another piece in the way, or to move the king. Depending on the state of the board, there might only be one possible move (quick caveat, sometimes that can mean literally just one move, other times it’s the most reasonable and sensible move and anything else would be considerably worse and lose the game even faster), and if the defending player is unlucky, then there might now be a series of moved that they’re now forced into. This usually comes into play with things like “mate in five” or “mate in 12”, where checkmate is possible within that many moves/turns.
If you’re really, really good, then you can do this quite a ways out, but we’re talking super GM, top 10-20 people in the world level of skill playing against somebody a couple hundred or more Elo below them.
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