Chess Grandmasters See Further into the Future

By Chess Analyst • December 27, 2025 • 3 Min Read

The difference between a casual player and a champion often lies in the timeline of their mind. A grandmaster or a world champion chess player may look 10 or more moves into the future, though rarely much further than that.

There is a limit to the human capability to visualize complex solutions. It seems likely that if chess players haven’t hit this absolute biological limit, they have come very close to it.

The Hierarchy of Vision

Visualization ability scales dramatically with skill level:

Beginners: May not visualize future moves at all, reacting only to the board as it is now.
Tournament Players: A decent player may look 4 or 5 moves ahead. This is enough to give them a massive advantage over a beginner.
Grandmasters: While their depth gives them an advantage over tournament players, even they face a ceiling.

However, looking 4 to 5 moves ahead, while impressive to a novice, usually ensures a thrashing from a grandmaster.

The Silicon Advantage

Computers operate on a different plane entirely. They can look 20 or more moves ahead and, crucially, they can check all variations without fatigue or error.

            This is the reason that a grandmaster cannot beat a computer without the computer assuming some sort of handicap.
        

The gap has widened so significantly that the current standard handicap requires the computer to give up at least a knight before the grandmaster has a realistic chance of winning.

The Lesson for Improvement

The correlation is clear: if you want to improve your chess game despite the complexity of the board, you should work on your visualization skills. The further ahead you can plan your game, the stronger you will become.

A Final Thought

But this raises a difficult question: What if you don’t want to work on your visualization skills? What if the intense mental calculation required for chess is just not for you?