Being aware of the thought process you employ to achieve certain results is essential to improving your chess. The fact is: you need to follow a very clear thought process when you are considering making every move. If you don't, you can make some serious blunders.
Many people lose a game or struggle in their efforts to win a game of chess simply because of a poor decision making process. Although there are many chess tips available on the Internet, the importance of having a clear decision making process is underrated.
The fact is, in most cases, you lose a game not because of something you didn't know, but because of something you knew but didn't apply this knowledge in the critical moment when it was needed.
This brings the question: what is a clear decision making process, and how can it help you?
A clear decision making process consists of a set of questions that will stimulate your chess memory for the position at hand, which will in turn help you to make the best moves. Basically, your assessment of the position will be based on the chess knowledge that your mind associates with the situation on the chess board. With a clear decision making process, you will be able to recall as much of the relevant knowledge from your memory as you can, and use that to make the right move.
The goal of a clear decision making process is to help you access all the information in your memory regarding the situation at hand. This means that you will be able to make the right decisions and avoid making some blunders.
What you need is the ability to use a systematic decision making process - if your thought process is random, you will make a mistake that will make you lose a game. A clear decision process will require you to do some position evaluation - where you ask yourself: based on the knowledge your mind associates with the situation on the board, what would be the best move?
You will also need to do some chess calculation whereby you will select some candidate moves, assess where they would lead to, and establish the outcome of the possible moves. You will also need to do a tactical check, to ensure that possible moves do not present any "dangers".
As part of your systematic decision process, you will also need to do a blunder check, to make sure that you are not making a grave mistake in any move, which can make you lose a game.
Central to the whole decision making process is your visualization skill - you will rely on your ability to "see" clearly in your mind your possible moves and their consequences, before you actually make the moves. Throughout your thought process, you rely on your visualization skill to visualize the results of your thinking process.
Since visualization skills are very important for every other skill, how can you improve your visualization? Visualwize is a software that trains your visualization ability, which is essential since even a clear decision-making process cannot serve you well if you cannot visualize the ideas which you are considering in your thought process.
If you want to improve your chess, the best chess tip you will need to take note of and implement is: improve your decision making process and visualization skill.
If you would like to improve your decision making process, you can start by improving your chess visualization, tactics and strategies skills.