Mastering Chess: How to Train Your Mind to Think Strategically

Chess is a game that goes beyond moving pieces on a board; it requires strategic, tactical, and analytical thinking.

We will explore why thinking is crucial in chess, the different types of thinking involved, and the steps of the thought process in a game.

Discover tips for improving your thinking skills, common mistakes to avoid, and how to train your brain to think like a chess player.

Dive into the world of chess thinking and enhance your gameplay today!

Why is Thinking Important in Chess?

Thinking is critical in chess to evaluate possible moves in order to make the most beneficial play. Thinking time is a limited commodity in timed games where a clock with flags at the edges is used to monitor total length of games and time taken for moves by each player. By surveying likely moves and counter-moves, one can anticipate what the board is likely to look like very quickly and plan moves that benefit or protect important pieces and attack positions on the board.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic Thinking in chess is how players apply tools, tactics, and intermediate and long-term goal planning to refine their vision over the course of the game. With these tools, players define their position’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the opponent’s position at any moment.

Strategic thinking has several components. These include central control. Central control refers to control in and around the center of the board with pawns and pieces. Additionally, king safety, initiative, space, doubling of major pieces (rooks or queens) on half-open files, and passed pawns are all key strategic considerations.

Tactical Thinking

Finding solutions to tactical problems that arise in the position, such as discoveries, forks, and pins. Comprehending and deploying tactical problems in chess is critical to advancing beyond the novice stage. Tactic problems hone the most critical skills for play, which makes one a better player when deployed correctly.

Tactical thinking is particularly essential in chess within the middle of the board when the king is still in the center and attacking chances are still abundant. So at that point, generating a piece’s productive or defensive role regarding tactical assets will improve the position.

Below is a position from a game between the 4th and 5th World Champions. Alekhine can win a piece by moving his bishop from g4 to f3 and giving checkmate. Instead, he moved his bishop to h3, forcing Capablanca to resign quickly.

Analytical Thinking

There are two main categories of analytical thoughts. Calculative thinking is when you analyze a position, evaluating and reevaluating it over and over until you can deduce that one move is ultimately the best move. Pattern recognition is when you analyze a position and think I have seen this before, so you attempt to apply your prior knowledge of moves that worked in similar past positions.

Pattern recognition is commonly referred to as Tacit or Intuitive Knowledge.

The Thought Process in Chess

The thought process in chess consists of the following steps, often multiple times and in different orders, according to the St. Louis Chess Club:

1. Assessment (e.g., what pieces are under attack)
2. Planning (e.g., finding moves for undeveloped pieces)
3. Calculation (e.g., how to handle capture endings according to Elliot Forney)
4. Intuition (e.g., knowing a certain position is not one to accept according to Tarjei Joten Svensen)
5. Searching for opportunities that benefit oneself or others (e.g., seeking safe sacrifices that give advantages)

Evaluating the Position

Good thinking in chess often starts with evaluating the position, meaning looking at the state of play on the board and mentally assessing the favorable and unfavorable aspects for each player. The best moves to make are often triggered by this initial assessment. A position can generally be assessed along the following lines according to the Queen’s University Belfast Handbook on Teaching Chess:

• Who is ahead in material count?
• Where is a side stronger or weaker?
• Piece activity and development?
• Prospects of attack or defense?
• Potential weaknesses on the board?
• Control over open lines (files, diagonals, and ranks)?
• Different opportunities to fight for control, counter-attacks, and strategic opportunities?
• Potential for future pawn structure?
• Kings’ safety?

Thinking is demonstrated in the Quincy, Illinois Chess Club’s cheat sheet examples of assessment, as shown in examples 1-5. Heightened board awareness explains why moving certain pawns or pieces in relatively safe positions where they weren’t was sometimes Korchnoi’s go-to move. When one dares to play with a unique style and keep the opponent from feeling like they will only be playing a computer, like Caruana, helps create a friendly strategic understanding that a chesstivist can use for solidarity purposes.

Identifying Potential Moves

Once you understand your objectives and constraints in a given position, you can then move on to coming up with potential moves, taking into account incomplete information. Chess masters such as Garry Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand stress the importance of generating a wide variety of potential candidate moves in a given position to themselves see both the pros and cons of each potential move and to best predict how their opponent might play.

Identifying potential moves will allow you to decide whether you want to simplify or complicate the position and allow you to better compare the fairness of potential moves. Once you have narrowed down your number of candidate moves, you can explore these moves visually by playing them out in your mind. By simulating these moves in your head, you will start to understand what your opponent may try in response to these moves and how to preempt them. This ability to simulate future moves on a chessboard relies heavily on your visual memory as scaling up is often the main challenge for most beginners.

One of the most important factors that beginners especially forget is making bad moves in one’s imagination and learning from them. The emphasis during visualization is not on achieving the right answers but on learning and making your intuition stronger. Those bad moves can be eliminated at a later time.

Calculating Variations

Once you have done the initial evaluation and you have a firm understanding of what has happened, it is essential that you then calculate variations for the current and future moves. Chess calculations can be a nightmare full of unforeseen pain and surprise, but it is a necessary skill to develop in order to understand what is possible.

Calculating variations is mainly used to gain a strategic advantage but can be equally preventive. For example, determining what the next five to ten moves may look like based on an intended move of one’s own or an opponent’s can offer insight either into the anticipated future of the game if one has the advantage or into missed possibilities when confused by the opponent.

Making a Decision

In chess thinking, the last step is making a decision which ultimately becomes your move. While thinking and contemplating various plans or techniques to execute among your potential candidate moves, you reach the part in your thinking process where you must decide, consciously forcing yourself to end the process and make a move.

Deciding which of the moves and strategies chosen during the previous stages of thinking should be made requires the same process as the previous stages. Once analyses are completed and you have chosen what move you think is the best for you, then just play it quickly without an unnecessarily long think.

After you have played your move, you may try to form as clear as seating plan as possible of possible upcoming moves in a separate section of your mind to help you react more quickly in the following turns. Your seating plan will be reset after another move is made, so be prepared to start the process of making a new decision quickly after making your own.

Tips for Improving Your Thinking in Chess

According to researchers of cognitive science, to think better in chess, players need to work on improving their attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and problem-solving abilities. Chess is a high-attention and high-working challenging sport for the mind, so individuals need to work on strengthening these important ​brain skills.

Here are tips to improve your thinking in chess:

1. Study classical games: observing games by grandmasters or world champions and attempting to guess candidate moves is a great work out for your cognitive abilities.
2. Practice playing the memory game Klondike: to improve recall abilities.
3. Keep your body and brain energetic by indulging in regular exercise.

Practice Visualization

Visualization means using your chessboard, and every piece of it, to calculate where your pieces will be and how they will move. Simply memorizing their current position and moving the piece in your head without understanding why or where they are going doesn’t count as visualization.

Here are three exercises to boost your visualization skills in chess while playing on mobile apps or desktop:

1. Play without piece labels.

To prevent associating pieces with their labels, try playing on online platforms where the letters for each piece can be turned off.

2. Check after you move.

Always ask yourself why the piece is better to move than another, not just whether it’s possible. This encourages in-depth analysis.

3. Simulate games.

Look back at classic games of grandmasters or titanic clashes and try to predict the moves that are about to be made. Every time you see a move made, think about the reason behind it. This can improve your game simulations and prediction skills.

Study Chess Games and Puzzles

Studying chess games and puzzles is the best way to understand strategy. This is part of the extensive preparation that all strong chess players undertake. The world’s best players may have spent up to 8 hours watching chess videos and analyzing games in preparation for a major chess event. One way to simulate that preparation is to commit to a regiment of reading from high-quality writers, watching numerous hours of top-level commentary, playing games against opponents at or above your skill level, reviewing tip and game analysis videos, and doing book puzzles and puzzle sites.

Books are a medium of understanding various basic chess concepts. But when planning to play over the board, emphasizing game observation and annotation is crucial as well. Through this, you are adding a visual element to help reinforce understanding and to commit a specific concept to memory. Solving puzzles is an excellent way of transitioning correct thinking about how to play and applying the strategies you have learned into rapid, effective execution. Chess puzzles do not need the lengthy calculations of a full game, but they focus mental attention on that point at which the majority of pieces should be strategically directed, and offer means of reinforcing basic skills such as finding checkmates in one-two moves.

For daily puzzles, learnChess is a good source to help you become a stronger player.

Analyze Your Own Games

Review your own recent and past matches. A match that you just completed assesses the efficiency of your moves. Do you remember any mistakes? Were all of the moves necessary for you to win the game?

Vasily Smyslov recommends assessing the number of bad or doubtful moves in Greenspeak of Chess. “If you played without a single indisputable error, the game is usually won. If you lose, it most likely happened due to your indisputable moves” (Yasser Seirawan).

Analyze past games and detect any repeat mistakes you are making. This will provide ideas on which aspects of the game to focus your development. This step is a follow-up to the previous one. You need to analyze your calculation mistakes so that the quality of your calculation will improve in future games.

Play Against Stronger Opponents

The best way to learn how to think in chess is to constantly challenge yourself. One way to do this is by playing against much stronger opponents. You will have to think harder in order to keep up with them. You are most likely to observe and learn solid and optimal thought processes during the game, which you can later apply in different contexts.

Common Thinking Mistakes in Chess

Common thinking mistakes in chess include playing too passively, not considering opponent moves or attacking opportunities, focusing excessively on immediate threats, miscalculated exchanges, playing prematurely, and tunnel vision. Tunnel vision refers to seeing only what you want to see in the position. This happens when one becomes so focused on a certain plan, or set of ideas, that one becomes blind to other tactical opportunities.

Fix thinking mistakes in chess by making sure each move contributes to your strategic plan. Additionally, give yourself time to think about your position and potential moves for at least ten seconds, and train your tactical vision using puzzles and exercises. In particular for use of tunnels, utilize the Tallinn method of analysis to explore an opponent’s ideas and plans.

Tunnel Vision

In tunnel vision, chess players narrow their strategy down to a single goal only, such as checkmating the opponent. A player is conditioned to think about plans with only one goal: Checkmating the opponent’s king. A true plan in chess means that a number of goals are achieved simultaneously. Having a narrow focus on one goal often results in missing or blundering other aspects of the game.

Overlooking Threats

One of the largest contributors to tortoise thinking in chess is not putting enough thought into the threats and capturing possibilities of opponents. All chess players must be able to analyze threats and potential threats made by both their opponent’s pieces currently on the board and incoming pieces, whether as a natural advancement move or castle move.

Peter Doggers identifies a common timidity in even very strong grandmasters against either overtly playing for material when a clear advantage is present, or defending a completely lost position despite a clear defeat ahead. Too often in such situations grandmasters instead misguide their play towards these “obvious” conclusions when a more aggressive course might provide better prospects or an earlier resignation may save precious energy and time. Such typical errors are based on failure to properly assess threats, and the tortoises instead just “go with the flow” when their personal strengths indicate it is time to make a big move.

Ignoring Opponent’s Plans

Ignoring your opponent’s plans is part of how to think in chess to protect your own position. This may be a useful modality of thinking if there is absolutely no initiative of play from the opponent. However, this form of thinking can exert pressure on one’s own initiative in the medium term, as the opponent will then naturally try to gain space and time to create ideas. Thus, ignoring the opponent’s plans for too long can create an impetus for the opponent to dominate throughout the game.

Lack of Patience

Lack of patience is another inadequate element people have in life, not only in chess. Lack of patience usually gives opponents the initiative and more chances to make mistakes.

If you don’t have patience, your underlying problem in chess should be avoided. Instead, play extremely attacking chess to stay sharp in the game and lose quickly so you can move on to activities you enjoy more. There is no room for a lack of patience in thoughtful, intricate psychological games like chess.

Conclusion: How to Train Your Brain to Think Like a Chess Player

In conclusion, trying to think like Magnus Carlsen in chess requires a lot of training and study where patience and self-awareness are important. Carlsen himself has stated that he frequently studies both his own lost games and the games of others where he must think through moves and decisions when a winning move wasn’t made or he allowed the other player undeserved opportunities.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How can I improve my thought process in chess?

To improve your thought process in chess, focus on developing your analytical skills, practice problem-solving techniques, and work on your decision-making abilities.

2. What is the most important aspect of thinking in chess?

The most important aspect of thinking in chess is being able to think ahead and anticipate your opponent’s moves, while also considering multiple possibilities for your own moves.

3. How can I train myself to think more strategically in chess?

You can train yourself to think more strategically in chess by studying different openings, middle game tactics, and endgame techniques. Additionally, analyzing your own games and learning from your mistakes can also improve your strategic thinking.

4. How do I avoid tunnel vision while playing chess?

To avoid tunnel vision in chess, try to constantly reassess the position and consider alternative moves. It’s important to keep an open mind and not get fixated on one plan or idea.

5. Can practice alone help me to improve my thinking in chess?

Yes, practicing alone can definitely help improve your thinking in chess. You can work on solving chess puzzles, analyze your own games, and play against yourself to develop your strategic thinking skills.

6. Is it important to take breaks while playing chess to improve my thought process?

Yes, taking breaks while playing chess is important to improve your thought process. It allows you to step back and reassess the position with a fresh perspective, preventing mental fatigue and potentially leading to better decisions in the game.