Eli5: how does a pro chess player see 10+moves ahead? What does that look like?
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Basically you’re predicting how your opponent will respond to your moves. You’ll think, “If I play A, he’ll play B, then I’ll do C, and he’ll do D, and I’ll play E . . . ” To do this well you have to be good at predicting how your opponent will respond to your plays. Sometimes the response is obvious because there is only one good thing for your opponent to do, but other times it’s not so obvious, and if your opponent makes a play you didn’t predict, you have to reorganize yourself and come up with a new approach.
When you read, you take in multiple words at a time, not a character at a time. When you construct a sentence, you don’t think in terms of noun/adverb/adjective; in fact, it is only when someone calls attention to your sentence and make you break it down grammatically do you think about what you said.
Similarly in chess, your brain recognizes patterns and memorizes best responses (tactics) as you play more and more. They don’t think move by move.
From my experience when you know one or two openings and defences in depth you pretty much know every move combination until the end game when it’s simpler (fewer pieces on the board) but less structured, that’s when this happens. I imagine the GMs take that to another level with multiple openings and defences and weird variations.
The number of possible options is actually very small. It’s like the difference between a fill in the blank test and a multiple choice test. Especially if the answer to question 1 helps you to pick the answer to question 2. So for a chess master its like “well the only good moves are A, B, and C; if they pick D none of the above I’ll just win. But then if they pick A, B, or C, my next move should be A, B, or C: D none of the above means I lose.”
Then it gets one step easier. Often its the same answers for several questions, and the only real issue is the order. “Do I move my king to safety first, move my queen to the good attack square first, or start the exchange now?” Even if you do A or B first, you’ll still eventually pick C. So its not even 30 possible answers, its more like 15.
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.
It’s mostly just being able to look at the board and identify all the best possible moves. Why do you think chess games are often long, quiet, and boring to watch? They go through all the possible moves they can make, how that benefits them, and how big of a risk it is. (Both short-term and long )
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