Chess is a sport in which the main tool is the intellect. The game is based on the ability to plan, analyze, and think strategically. But how exactly does the thinking process take place in the game of chess? What does the chess player rely on, when as a result he gets the most correct and beautiful decision? And what mental functions are behind true chess skill – memory, attention, perception, or thinking itself?

Scientists and psychologists have repeatedly tried to answer these questions. Of course, any chess player would like to understand how exactly he could “train” his own psyche in order to achieve the greatest heights in the art of chess. Many researchers, for example, de Groot, F. Gobet, and K. Erikson, have insisted that the nature of chess skill lies in the capabilities of memory: each move is the result of comparing memorized probabilities of decisions, templates, which are chosen by the chess player himself. And, accordingly, they insisted on the development of this very mental function for the most effective game. Other researchers, for example, Reigolton, insisted that the secret of chess players lay in the capacity of their perception, and that good moves were found because the chess player had the possibility of grasping the maximum number of good moves with his attention, of seeing the situation in its entirety. In the opinion of Houlding, the ability of chessmasters to find the best solutions has to do not so much with the patterns already present in the chess player’s past experience, which he uses to quickly and exhaustively recognize configurations, as with the process of actively seeking new connections in the available information and interpreting it; that is, directly with the possibilities of thinking.

Interesting conclusions about the thinking patterns of chess players were made by Soviet scientists of the school of O.K. Tikhomirov. Scientists used the chess game as a model for studying thinking as such – to do this, they followed the chess player’s eye movements during a chess game, measured the psychophysiological and psychological indicators of this process of solving chess problems, and discovered many interesting patterns of chess skill.

Researchers noticed that the master, in contrast to the chess player of the third category, has a much better ability to transfer information from one situation to another, the search activity is much faster and more capacious. They think through more of a global strategy, without getting stuck on finding the means to achieve them. For example, a chess player who is just beginning his journey and has not reached mastery, spends much more time not on finding the best solutions, but simply on examining his pieces – where they can go, where they cannot. Also, masters, much more than beginners, are oriented and sensitive to those characteristics of the situation that help them shave a more comprehensive solution. They are more flexible and always consider several alternative situations. And at this point, the chess player engages all psychological functions – from memory and perception of the situation to the most complex and highly organized metacognitions. The function of emotions in the process of detecting a good chess move is also interesting. The chess player feels the joy of finding a solution moments before he realizes it!

In order for this set of thought acts to be realized, it is especially important for the chess player to receive feedback after each decision. This helps to correct incorrect thought techniques that interfere with approaching the game in a more comprehensive way.

Chess mastery is undoubtedly a complex multi-component phenomenon, which cannot simply be explained by any limited number of mental mechanisms – only memory, attention.

In order to really develop your own intellect to a level which will allow you to master the art of chess at a high level, you need to analyze your own games regularly, study classical chess culture, and try to combine different kinds of training which improve different possibilities of thinking. It is important to implement within them what helps thinking to act in conjunction with memory, attention, perception, the emotional sphere, namely: guessing, description of the move and strategy in the study of the laws of the game, deepening, strategic planning, goal setting.