Eli5: how does a pro chess player see 10+moves ahead? What does that look like?
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Regular players just see the game differently. When you read a word, you aren’t actually looking thinking about each letter. Theres also many common sentences you read without actually having to concentrate on every word. The chess pieces and moves are like letters. Yah theres an infinite amount of ways to combine them, but the literate are familiar with the most common and useful combinations, and dismiss all of the useless ones. They arent looking at how to arrange every letter to form an idea, they’re looking at how to arrange words to make an idea. They see how the pieces and moves relate to each other and apply that pattern, not necessarily each individual move. The ideas from calculation isn’t often spontaneous either; multiple themes can sit on the board for many moves waiting to be exploited, so you already know important details and strong ideas before calculating. When you stop seeing chess as a game of pieces and moves and instead as blocks of patterns and ideas it’s not hard to imagine calculating many moves ahead.
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