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?
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At the start of the game the White player will choose a system. A set of moves and strategies for the opening. The Black player will choose a defense based off that system.
After leaving the opening each player examines the board and begins to plan a “line,” a series of moves designed to put them in a better position. The better the player is, the further ahead their line will be, and the more accurate their read on their opponent’s response will be.
At the same time each player is trying to guess the opponents line and tailor theirs in a way as to avoid falling in line with it.
Edit: Lines are why post game analysis is so entertaining. Rather than just be surprised and impressed by one move live, you can look back and see how that move came to be and at what point in the line the opponent was outplayed.
It’s more than number of moves ahead. It’s a series of if/then permutations, which quickly gets exponentially more complicated.
I can easily think 10 moves ahead… as long as the opponent does exactly the 5 moves I anticipate.
If the opponent does something unexpected (or even dumb) at any of those points, I have to recalibrate for the new situation and potentially generate a new plan.
Short answer: yes they do, but it’s way more complicated than simply thinking ahead. It’s a whole branching system of “if this, then that; if that, then this.”
Seeing moves ahead is not as profound as it might seem.
Here is an example of what “looking ahead” looks like for each turn ahead you can see.
1. Being able to see all the pieces on the board and their potential moves.
2. Being able to see what each piece will be able to do after that potential move.
3. Seeing the best potential moves for you and your opponent based on the second move and how to either prevent this or capitalize on it.
4. Adjusting your previous strategy around the reaction to your previous best move to prevent a counter strategy which would give your opponent an advantage.
This sequence changes drastically based on the position of the board.
Good openings can be studied relentlessly due to the limited nature of their potential positions/responses that can allow for powerful starts to games.
End games fall under the same idea, where you can study the potential combination of multiple pieces and how to win with them.
Mid game becomes a game of pattern recognition. Little chess puzzles to see the consequences of combined positions. Recognition of piece orientation. It is unlikely to ever see an exact position but you can always catch glimpses of positions where a bishop/pawn/rook can be used against a rook/knight/queen or something similar.
It becomes like data packages. The chess player is not looking at the board in front of them but the potential for recognisable positions that they have considered and planned for.
I was a decent level player when younger (not IGM level) and the first 20 or so moves in a game are already broadly known when you know your openings or defences well enough. The middle and end game is when you need to think of multiple combos 10 moves ahead for some for sure
They usually play the openings from memory. Eventually, they get to a position that they haven’t memorized and they then have to think. Whether or not they think ten movies ahead depends on how complicated the board is. When the board gets down to just kings, knights, and pawns, they may very well think ten moves ahead.
In the early game, top players are choosing between known “openings” that have various tactical advantages and disadvantages. Once into the midgame, they are thinking multiple moves ahead like OP discussed, but also using their experience and knowledge of overall strategy to know what types of positions tend to yield advantages (like losing a piece but gaining a better position). In the endgame with just a few pieces left, they can end up thinking about 10 to 20 moves ahead because it’s possible to calculate all the variations.
Yes and no; it’s weirder than that.
Studies show that chess masters are better at recalling what a board looks like at a glance [William Chase (1940-1983) and Herbert Simon (1916-2001)]. A normal person might accurately recall ~4 piece positions on a board after 5 seconds to look. Masters could recall upwards of 20 in the same time.
The reason why is that when you play chess for long enough, you start to get good at recognizing patters in the game. You don’t have to think “10 moves ahead” most of the time, because you can just recognize a chunk of the board as “a shit situation to be in”.
You can then choose to either not exacerbate that situation, or try to find a way to fix it. But either case is a lot easier than “I shall look into the next 10^37 theoretical ways this could play out and only then make my choice!!” It’s more just they know what doesn’t bode well
The only time in which thinking that far ahead is relevant is when you have very few choices; and in those cases, you’re typically being forced into the choice by a fairly obvious threat; that is, it’s clear what the intent of your opponent is, and it’s easier to see what’s gonna happen.
Disclaimer: I’m really not very good at the whole “explaining like you’re *actually* five” thing, but I do have a lot of subject knowledge and expect that someone who is at least a high schooler should be able to understand my explanation without any issues. Let me know if you have questions though.
Let’s start with a simpler game, tic tac toe. Most of us learn pretty quickly that as long as X goes in the corner or middle first, it’s very simple to force a draw, and even if you don’t go through all the options exhaustively, you probably go through a lot of them just by playing enough times. This being said, what you’re doing when you think to yourself “if I make move A, they have moves B and C; if they make move B, I have move D which lets me set up a 2 way trap to win, and if they make move C I can block them and force a draw, so move A leads to a draw” is something called the *minimax algorithm*, which is just a fancy way of saying that you evaluate the effectiveness of a move based on the best result that you can guarantee (move A led to a draw because your opponent can choose between a draw or a win for you, whereas a move in which you have a path to victory for any move they make would be a winning move, and a move in which they have a path to victory you cannot prevent is a losing move).
Chess can technically be completely solved in this manner—if you were to look at every possible terminal position (a position where the game is over), and worked backwards to evaluate every move leading up to these terminal positions, you would successfully solve chess completely and have everything you need to play it optimally. This would take orders of magnitude more computing power than is currently possible, however, and so instead we have to do our best to imitate the moves that this kind of analysis would lead to, without having the information necessary to verify that your move forces a win (or at least prevents a draw).
Luckily, humans have gotten pretty good at evaluating positions qualitatively. We understand that generally having more pieces than the opponent is an advantage, as well as having a king in a safer position, having connected pawn chains, having passed pawns close to promoting, having bishops over knights on a relatively open board, etc and from experience can get pretty good at using this understanding to make moves that we think will allow us to maintain or gain an advantage later on, even if we can’t necessarily give the exact moves well into the future that will allow for this. We can also understand the concept of *tactics*, relatively short sequences of moves that allow us to force a position we see as favorable, such as a sequence of moves that wins a rook without making any visible concessions, and generally tactics follow directly from a good positional understanding of the game—if your pieces are well-positioned, the threats they can make are easily accessible and restrictive on your opponent’s moves.
Computers take this a step further using a variety of methods, with most modern chess engines using neural networks. Remember the minimax algorithm I described? Well, one approach we can take (which is the approach used by Stockfish, the strongest engine) is that if a computer can evaluate a position by assigning it a number, where that number represents whom the computer thinks will win with what level of certainty (say, +100 is a guaranteed won game, -100 is a guaranteed lost game, 0 is a draw, and something like +10 is a position we think is good, but can’t compute far enough forward to guarantee that it’s good), then we can use those number assignments to find what our best move is, based on what sequence of moves guarantees the highest evaluation possible to us. Note that we’re not hoping our opponent stumbles into a position that’s good for us, we are, to the best of our ability, looking to guarantee a position that’s good for us, and doing so well is dependent on 1) being good at assigning that numerical evaluation to a position, and 2) being able to look as far into the future as possible.
Sometimes they might have to look a dozen or so moves ahead. But in truth they’ve studied their first 10+ first movies and almost always know what moves are solid/best. Alot of it is pattern recognition, you don’t actually calculate each individual move if you recognize a pattern or high level player will likely recognize the position as a whole. Thats what alot of newer players dont realize, we just recognize a patterns and have drilled responses to them. Many times you and your opponents strongest Ideas will be obvious, its all the very small choices that add up along the way that usually decide the game. Heavy calculation usually shows up if their is a high risk movie that you NEED to know if it pays off, and in endgames where the line between win/loss/draw is so so small.
If you watch some chess streams they’re legit going 10 moves ahead. Also, beginning of games all the moves are known by grandmasters, you follow a design until you don’t, then it becomes middle game. But streamers like Hikaru will literally lay out there next 10 moves to you before
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