Much of what I know about chess improvement comes from a single concept: Good intuition is the bedrock of good chess play.

I’ve seen a lot of good players talking through their thought process, and it’s obvious that they’re not just figuring things out over the board. They’ve ingested a lot of patterns that relate to various chess positions, and some of them apply to the position in front of them. They have a large mental library of ideas and plans that will help them to win or draw a game, and the relevant aspects of a position that indicate one idea or another. This library is not deeply buried in their minds - the basic ideas come quickly and naturally based on the factors of a given position. When we’re talking about good intuition, we’re talking about the quality and quantity of ideas and plans that quickly arise when a person first looks at a chess position.

Good chess players are also usually good calculators - looking deeply into a position over a longer period of time - but to me this factor always seemed secondary. It does no good to calculate if your basic ideas of what you should be doing are wrong, and the move tree that you’re exploring will grow far too large unless you have an instinctive feeling for the small number of moves that make sense in a given position being visualized. A player who has good intuition but doesn’t calculate well will always outperform a good calculator who does not have good intuition.

From listening to player interviews and from what I’ve observed myself, it seemed as though most of the calculation a good player employed didn't discover new ideas. It ensured that an idea that they saw within seconds actually worked. A player might spend time choosing between two or three plans, but the plans themselves were available to them almost immediately. Even a wholly new, creative idea almost always had, at its basis, some similar idea the player had known that was being reapplied or reworked in some new way.

The analogy for chess intuition that always made sense to me was in the context of learning how to use a language. Chess ideas are like vocabulary - you have to learn words and phrases, what they mean and when you should use them. I might spend time formulating a particular sentence or what I want to say, finding the right word or phrase for what I’m trying to accomplish with my speech, and spending that time is important to speak well, but the words and phrases themselves are just there. One can’t speak a language well without having a good vocabulary.

The importance of intuition can be easily seen when one sees how well strong players can play with even very little time to make moves. In blitz, or bullet, strong players will blunder more, but they make relatively high quality moves despite having virtually no time available for calculation.

Perhaps most importantly from the perspective of my own chess improvement, as an older player I had doubts about my ability to improve my calculating ability. My ability to visualize positions wasn’t as good as it had been in my teens and twenties, and while I knew I could practice visualization more I could also see how this might be a muscle that wouldn’t improve with age. The best proof for me here was the observation that many of the strong players who maintained their strength as they aged tended to be intuitive players rather than calculating machines.

Early on in my improvement journey I decided to focus on improving the quality of my intuition rather than working on improving my calculation ability. This was an easier decision for me personally because my calculation ability was decent to start with, but even if it hadn’t been I believe that good intuition is the foundation for good calculation anyway. My calculating ability had been worthless in the wide variety of positions where I had not developed good intuition.

It turned out that this was a good call. Virtually all of the progress I was able to make was due to improvements in my intuition, and much of my frustration with the existing chess improvement literature and techniques came from the fact that they didn’t help me to accomplish this as effectively as I managed when working out techniques for myself.

The remainder of this guide, and this site as a whole, is devoted to helping readers best develop their chess intuition as efficiently as possible.