A sense of danger

I have a pet theory, based not on hard data but on insights from postmortem chitchat. My theory says that novices and experts, when facing evenly matched opponents, make roughly the same number of screw-ups in a game. The difference is that the novice’s oversights will be far more significant. The novice walks into checkmate, where the grandmaster hangs a pawn. One blunders a bishop, where the other concedes a softening of the pawn structure.

Strong players rely on their well-honed sense of danger to avoid the most egregious errors. After studying hundreds of thousands of tactical motifs, one just knows when a situation looks sketchy – perhaps there are a couple of undefended pieces, and the king is open to attack. Sometimes you have to work with that, but then the mental gears work hard to make sure the house of cards won’t collapse. The worst case scenario is always covered.

The second guardian angel is a (measured) respect for the opponent.