Awesome article. Nit:

> the average chess grandmaster during a classical game will analyze roughly the same number of moves as an amateur player, but they analyze only the most critical moves and do a better job with that analysis.

I don't buy this. I've seen GMs playing online while verbalizing their thought process (on twitch / youtube videos where they livestream their play), and they consider way more branches than I do, while also going deeper than I ever would on some branches. My top rating in lichess blitz is about 1900, not bad but way lower than a GM.

There's an analog in machine chess. According to the research paper from 2017, AlphaZero considered ~10,000 moves per decision, 1,000x fewer than Stockfish at the time. h2h it beat Stockfish pretty badly.

I am about 300 points higher and think this is roughly correct. In openings amateurs will actually analyze more since GMs just have hundreds of opening lines memorized many moves deep. Middlegame and endgame there're usually just 1-3 reasonable plans that are obvious to a GM (but not at all obvious to amateurs) with 1-3 initial moves each. So, again, probably about as many as I consider.

The only time when GM will definitely analyze more lines than an amateur is in a highly tactical position but that happens, again, maybe 1-3 times per typical game (tactics themselves will last several moves, but they would be largely calculated through at the beginning of the tactical melee).

My rating is negative 1900. I was always bad at chess and never really gave it a chance tbh. I always wondered though where does the pattern matching stop and strategy starts or it's one and the same?

Human brain can do calculations in the back of their head without realizing it. Verbalizing does not mean it's all they thought about.

an amateur player --> shouldn't an amateur player have an average ELO, i.e. be nearly as bad as me, who never wins at chess when someone even knows their ELO or is a bot above lowest difficulty level.

Right, but the GMs you see online are often "super GMs". They are on a category of their own in the ultra tail.

It makes sense. The space of moves is a tree. If you're doing a breadth-first search and a grandmaster is doing a more depth-oriented search with heuristics for pruning low value branches, then the same total number of moves could be considered, but the grandmaster is reaching the better moves before you.

Yeah I would like to see where that factoid comes from. Maybe it means they explore as many branches from the root position as an amateur, but they explore each branch way deeper and more accurately

GMs also have access to a greater number of memorized situations. Regardless of whether they are conscious of it or not, they have previously analyzed so many moves that they can cut off branches they just know instinctively to be dead ends. Machines could do this, directly reference a massive dataset of precomputed board positions, but that isn't considered a proper chess engine... despite the fact that human GMs do use such techniques.