The basic principle I used for developing my own intuition was one I stated as: “You are what you eat.”

The idea is that your mind will reproduce the patterns it sees and spends time with. If you spend a lot of time looking at queen sacrifices, then queen sacrifices will more naturally spring to mind. If you spend time looking at games where both sides castle kingside, then you’ll be more inclined to consider kingside castling on a given move. The patterns you surround yourself with are the ones your mind will quickly reproduce.

This concept is again one that I stole from how one learns a language. Because we’re talking about intuition - ideas that spring forth immediately and naturally from the brain when confronted with a given context - it made sense to me to try to approximate how one learns a new language. Once one knows a language, the words and phrases just jump into one’s head as soon as the proper context presents itself - and a significant part of one’s fluency with a language can be found in the quality and quantity of words and phrases that present themselves. The best way to learn a language is, of course, immersion - spending your time with helpful people who speak a language well and where you are forced to imitate them in order to do the things you want to do. Much of my work on improving intuition was trying to bring about this set of circumstances for my brain - immersing myself in the patterns I wanted to imitate, and then trying to reproduce them in the relevant context.

My task was something similar to what Mr. Shorman had done with his classes when he had shown us example after example of attacking games, and had us guess the moves. By having us spend time thinking about attacking positions and then showing us good moves to play in those positions, we were spending our time ingesting good patterns. Morphy may have been long dead, but his moves lived on and I learned a lot about rapid development by spending time with them.

This principle of immersion is one that I feel is underrepresented in chess improvement techniques today. It exists in the approaches of studying “model games” and “learning the classics”, but much of chess improvement today is focused on regular practice and analysis instead of immersion. Playing your own games and analyzing them is a key part of chess improvement, but without the exposure to better patterns it is incredibly slow. Playing a player who is similar in skill to you really doesn’t do the job very well. Compare it to trying to learn French by using a French-to-English dictionary and practicing conversing with your friend who also does not know French. You may be able to kind of learn French this way, but you’re probably going to be learning it pretty badly for a long time, and even after years of doing this a fluent French speaker would probably listen to you with horror. Playing games against good players is far better for exposure to good patterns (like practicing conversation with a fluent French speaker), but you’d still likely learn only a subset of patterns - the ones a good player uses with a bad one. Something like practicing with a fluent French speaker and really learning the phrase in French for “That’s not how you say that.” Practicing chess puzzles is kind of useful, but the exposure to the good pattern is very short - most of the time it simply amounts to practicing calculation and then if you get it wrong you quickly move onto the next puzzle.

In language immersion, one is absolutely forced to use the language before you’re fluent - like playing chess games before you’re good - but that practice is closely paired with the observation of good patterns. That’s the idea behind “You are what you eat.” A lot of my chess work was figuring out how best to do that - how to pair the exposure to good patterns alongside my practice of those patterns. The techniques that follow are my attempt to leverage the outstanding tools we have available to us today to accomplish that virtuous cycle.