Instinct v. Analysis

Playing lots of games is supposed to develop your pattern recognition or more broadly speaking your intuition or instinct--whatever you want to call the phenomenon of knowing what moves to consider without even consciously understanding how. Some players develop their instinct a lot quicker than others and I'm not blessed in this regard. Even so, every once in awhile something in my brain tells me the move that needs to be played even before I've done any analysis. Unfortunately it also sometimes happens that when I do the analysis it doesn't agree with the instinct.

My opponent has just played 12. ... f5. I sensed this was a mistake because it weakened the e6 square, which I could attack with 13. Ng5, threatening N(x)e6 forking the Black queen and rook. This seemed like the obvious move, but when I analyzed it it didn't seem like it worked. After 13. ... Rf6 I can't take on e6 and 14. e5 attacking the rook didn't help because it had a safe square on g6. It looked to me like eventually Black just plays ... h6 and forces the knight back and I accomplish nothing.

But I couldn't stop trying to make it work. 13. Ng5 had to be the right move. It just had to. But no matter how I did the analysis I didn't see that it accomplished anything. I took almost nine minutes before I decided that my instinct was wrong, and the analysis just didn't support the move. I took so long looking at 13. Ng5 that I didn't take sufficient time analyzing the alternatives, and I played the error 13. e5?? and then followed it up with an even worse blunder on the following move, losing a piece and the game instantly.

As you may have guessed, my instinct was right and my analysis was wrong. After 13. Ng5 Rf6 14. e5 (14. a4 first is actually better) Rg6 15. Nh3 White has the terrific square f4 for the knight on the following move with an excellent position. Since it didn't win any material or lead to an immediate attack I ended up dismissing the entire line since 13. Ng5 seemed like it should lead to immediate gains for White and it didn't. If I had followed my instincts I would have played the best move, but my analysis betrayed me and led me to discard it instead.

You may think I'm going to tell you that you have to listen to your instinct in these situations and not get too hung up on analysis. But I have a counterexample taken from one of my OTB games where I was faced with a similar dilemma:

Here my intuition was screaming at me that the right move was 14. h4, expanding on the kingside and threatening h5 forcing the Black knight off of g6. But as with the previous game, when I analyzed it I didn't see that it accomplished anything. First of all Black could stop the advance of the pawn with ... h5 but even if he allowed 15. h5 I didn't see how I could develop an attack without castling queenside or leaving my king in the center which would bring a lot of problems. And yet, 14. h4 just seemed like it had to be right. I kept going over possible lines of play thinking there had to be something important I was missing, but after using a bunch of time on it I decided it just didn't work, and I decided to play 14. 0-0 instead.

Stockfish says 14. 0-0 is the best move and White holds a big advantage afterward. My "intuitive" 14. h4 wasn't a bad move or a blunder or anything, and White would still have been better if I had played that instead. Even so, I played a superior move because I trusted my analysis that told me that there was really no payoff to the proposed move.

In general analysis has to prevail over instinct. If you just play the first move that looks good without doing any analysis you're playing blitz or bullet chess, which is fine at those time controls but will kill you in a slow game. Unfortunately sometimes your instinct will be right and your analysis wrong, as occurred in the first game above, and you'll lose some games as a result. Intuition is still helpful in coming up with candidate moves and that sort of thing, but ultimately you win games by looking at specific moves that produce specific results.

When your instinct disagrees with your analysis, unless you're in a time scramble or something you should go with the analysis. When you get good your analysis will usually back up your instinct, and even at my level it probably does most of the time, it's just that because there's no disagreement I don't have to choose one over the other and I don't even think about it that way.

One last thing: when you get into the instinct v. analysis dilemma it's important to recognize it and make a decision before you use too much time. It's possible that instinct will tell you to play one move and analysis another, but they might both be good moves, as occurred in the second game above. Unless it's a critical position you don't want to get into time trouble later because you spent ten minutes trying to prove that your instinct was right all along. This actually happened to me in the OTB game above; I chose the better move, but took too much time trying to justify 14. h4, got into time trouble, and lost from a much better, maybe even winning, position. I have enough problems getting into time trouble just dealing with normal analysis; I don't want to add to that by trying to prove the correctness of an instinctual move that the analysis doesn't back up.