Eli5: how does a pro chess player see 10+moves ahead? What does that look like?
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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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