Grandmaster's Chess Thinking

Thought Protocol

          "The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones." — J.R. Capablanca

During the famous 1938 AVRO International Tournament in Netherlands, professor Adriaan de Groot conducted an experiment about the thought process of various players from amateurs to that of masters.

In one critical experiment, professor de Groot presented an isolated pawn-position (shown in diagram) taken from an analysis of a game between Lasker and Capablanca.

Lasker - Capablanca

White's turn

In this test position, chess players were asked to find the best move and to "think out loud" at the same time. Good players were able to focus on better moves and much more in agreement about the evaluation of the position as almost winning for the first player.

As a practical task, i suggest you examine and write down in words what you think about the test position. Support your analysis with short variations while also keeping time spent to complete the exercise. 

In addition... 

The boxed image below is an illustration of some of the experiments performed by Chase, Simon and Gobet, in which players of different chess skill have to "reconstruct chess positions" from memory with the pieces located properly or randomly on the board.

The image shown is taken from "The Expert Mind " by P. Ross

To conclude, the results suggested that the expert mind's representation of the chessboard is not organized based on the real distance between two or more pieces, but it is instead governed by the chess relationship ("chess patterns") between them – known as the "chunking theory".