#14: Intuition in Chess

Why you should trust yours, and how to improve it

What is intuition in chess?

Your opponent plays a move, and you immediately know what you want to play in response.

If you’ve played chess for some time, you might have developed this ‘chess unconscious’ that guides you.

Intuition can be thought of as logical thought happening instantaneously.

—All-time Shōgi great and FM Yoshiharu Habu, The Power of Intuition (直感力)

Illustrations: irasutoya

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Are you an intuitive player?

In Foundations of Chess Strategy, GM Lars Bo Hansen proposed 4 types of players, based on these 2 questions:

• Do you reach your decisions at the board through logic or through your experience and intuition?

• Do you think and play on the basis of facts (e.g. concrete calculation of variations) or do you focus on general concepts?

from page 32 of the book.

Intuitive players are players who simply feel what the right move is and how they must place their pieces to obtain maximum coordination. They are often very strong in determining the value of positional or long-term sacrifices, which cannot be assessed through concrete calculation or logical deduction. Often such players have difficulty explaining verbally how they reached their decision to play a given move or to choose that particular plan. It is very much tacit knowledge. For the chess-playing public, it is difficult to follow games of such players live, since their play is often subtle and much is going on ‘behind the scenes’. At the end of the game, however, everything often becomes clear—now it is clear that this was the right way to play or to coordinate the pieces, and that the opponent was outplayed.

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Why should you trust your intuition?

Let’s start with the opposite: not trusting your intuition.

Litchfield (2134)-Ikeda (2417), Doeberl Cup 2023 (3.5), 07.04.2023

I was surprised by 11.Nb5 as the natural 11…Be7 would force 12.bxa5 Rxa5 when White is left with a weak a-pawn.

However, I was immediately attracted by the idea 11…axb4 12.Nxd6+ cxd6 13.axb4 Rxa1+ 14.Bxa1 Qa8.

Somehow my intuition loved this idea of giving up the bishop pair (and potentially also exchanging my other bishop for the Nf3). I spent a third of my remaining time (from 63 minutes down to 42) calculating and overthinking the potential consequences. In the end, I doubted myself and played the ‘safe’ 11…Be7.

I had a good position, but my opponent played practical, healthy moves (most importantly, quickly) and he converted well after I went astray in time trouble.

I’m an intuitive player, and most of the time (including the above), my gut turns out to be right. However, connected to the fear of making mistakes, I have a fear of trusting my own intuition sometimes, which can have a debilitating effect on confidence.

Some perfectionists aren’t sufficiently sure of themselves to trust their intuition, think long and hard and outplay players higher rated, feel confident, mess it up in time trouble, which undermines their confidence, start again a little unsure of themselves, play slowly and so it goes on. I have seen this with many players and it has made me think that the perfectionist’s problem, before lack of pragmatism, is lack of basic self-belief.

—GM Jonathan Rowson, The Seven Deadly Chess Sins

You should trust your intuition, not blindly but as a loyal servant, because:

• your intuition comes from your own accumulated experience

• self-belief is an underestimated component in chess performance

• examining your intuition is a shortcut to finding your own thoughts and feelings

• if it turns out to be wrong, at least you can learn from it and draw some lessons, but if you’re wrong when you don’t trust your intuition, it’s a depressing cycle.

Intuition isn’t only a tool for finding a path. The self-belief to trust in your choices, your decisions, and ignore all others. That’s surely another way that intuition manifests itself.

—Yoshiharu Habu

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How can you improve your intuition?

Whether you’re an intuitive player or not, it’s useful to think about your relationship with your intuition.

1. If you’re relatively new to the game, you might not have developed a keen intuition yet

Intuition is the kind of thing that appears to you within one second, with your brain automatically cross-checking the position with patterns of past successes and failures. You should be able to explain something your intuition comes up with. To have a fertile well of resources within yourself to draw from, you need to have played a lot.

2. Rowson on cultivating your intuition (The Seven Deadly Chess Sins)

• We do talk of ‘using’ your intuition after all, by which we usually mean going with your gut feeling, or something similar. Thus it is possible to think of intuition, as well as being our ‘chess unconscious’, as a type of ‘muscle’ that can be exercised.

• ‘Talking with your pieces’ is an effective way to cultivate your intuitive abilities.

• ‘Guess’ more often. When playing through a game or seeing a new position, make a quick judgement about the position and how play may develop and then compare this to the given analysis and/or your more considered opinion having looked at the position for a longer period of time. This will give you some sense of your intuitive abilities and should help you to make more successful guesses and eventually to trust your first impressions more.

• The second is the idea of ‘positional sketches’, which basically involves the sketching of instructive positions on a card and making sense of it to yourself in your own words. Although I haven’t used this technique for a while, I feel it was instrumental in my passage from IM to GM. The technique is based on the idea that it’s not just the number of positions you have in your ‘intuitive database’ that counts, but how well you understand them and how you can adapt them, usually unconsciously, to your problems over the board. For example, if you are making the same type of error again and again in chess, it can be quite cathartic to draw out the positions where you went astray and see them together in all their ‘glory’.

3. Search for, and play, ‘your’ kind of chess

Whatever level you’re playing at, it’s easy these days to find out which of your moves were good and bad, from an ‘objective’ point of view.

But to work on your intuition, I think the ‘subjective’ point of view is also important.

• Were you happy with the way you played? Why/why not?

• Why did you shy away from particular moves?

• Were there positions you particularly liked or found interesting, and vice versa?

While you obviously want to play objectively strong moves and have good results, thinking about what kind of chess you want to play can help choose a direction.

Your intuition represents all of the chess you’ve played, trained, studied, observed and lived until now. Perhaps even more importantly, it tells you what you like and don’t like, your hopes and fears. Think about the improvements you’d like to see in your own intuition, and an approach to chess that might get you closer to that.

Or even better, ask your intuition.

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Other posts relating to intuition in chess

Mikhail Tal. “Knowledge? Intuition? Risk?”, part 1 (Spektrowski on Chess.com)

Play Chess Like a Firefighter (FM Nate Solon on Substack)