How does a game of chess work between two top level players? Do they have to think like 25 moves ahead to find any sort of opening against the opponent?
In: 347
Pattern recognition.
The human mind is extremely good at it. The average number of legal moves in any legal position is 35. A top player will discard 90% of them out of the bat because they’re just trash. Then they let their brain work their magic on the remaining 10%, using their experience (and sometimes intuition) to figure out which moves look promising. We interpret them as **ideas**. Attacking, defending, positional play, etc.. Chess obviously does not have any real logic embedded in its rules, but it’s how humans approach the game.
Once a top player has settled on a smaller number of moves, they can then **calculate**. That means, they’ll think ahead as many moves as they possibly can using reasonable countermoves they think are best for the opponent, and determine if the position they get is advantageous or not.
A player will not calculate all possible move paths 25 moves deep. Not that it’s impossible at all, it’s pretty much par for the course for a top player to be able to keep track of the position in their head past 10-15 theoretical moves. But they won’t calculate that deep for every single variation. The reason for that is simple: chess is a time-based game. You can spend 40 minutes on a move if you want, but that’s time off your clock. It gives your opponent a time advantage. Also, a player will not calculate until they see a win. That’s just not realistic. They will do so until they can see an advantage or material gain most of the time.
The assertions I’m making here are obviously blanket statements, different players have different thought processes.
Latest Answers