Magnus Carlsen, current chess world No. 1. Image credits: Frans Peeters.

The cliché says good decisions take time. But in professional chess, the opposite pattern keeps appearing. When elite players took longer, their moves were less likely to match the best move recommended by a powerful chess engine.

In a sweeping analysis of more than 215,000 moves from roughly 3,600 professional over-the-board chess games, researchers found that top chess players were more likely to make the best move when they moved faster. But that doesn’t mean you should always trust your gut. Rather, players tend to think more when the pattern isn’t clear or they feel in danger.

Your Move

Chess is the thinker’s sport par excellence. There’s no lucky bounce, no teammate to bail you out; it’s just you and your opponent, staring down across 64 squares. Chess is often a slow, grinding game, and every move should have foresight and calculation behind it. You’d expect the best moves to come after some deliberation.

But chess is (especially if you’re a good player) a lot about pattern recognition. Sometimes, the moves just stand out intuitively.

As a behavioral economist, Professor Uwe Sunde was interested in exploring this.

“Previously, most studies looking at decision time and quality have analyzed relatively simple decisions, frequently involving students in standardized lab settings,” says Sunde. “In our research, when we’re examining actual decisions outside the laboratory, we often have to rely on observations that are not strictly comparable.”

Sunde and colleagues judged the best move with the aid of computers. Computers are now so much better than humans at chess that you can essentially use them as a benchmark to see how good the human move was. They excluded the first 15 moves, because openings are often memorized rather than actively decided. They also compared results across three time formats:

• Classical chess (longest time format, where games often last more than a couple of hours)
• Rapid (where each player usually has about 20 minutes of thinking time)
• Blitz (where players usually have 3 minutes of thinking time).

Across all time formats, faster decisions were associated with higher move quality. This held even after accounting for three obvious confounders: how much time the player had left, how computationally complex the position was, and how large the gap was between the best and second-best move.

The worst results were in Blitz, where people have the least amount of time to think, and where a minute matters much more than in the other formats.

The Fast Brain Is Sometimes the Good Brain

The study’s main finding is that chess players made better moves when they moved faster, but there’s a warning.

It’s not like moving faster magically improves judgement. Rather, the reason is that quick decisions often happen when experts recognize the right pattern early. When the players recognize the patterns, they’re comfortable making quick decisions (even though they’re not always right in this assessment).

But longer pauses don’t make for worse decisions. These pauses reveal uncertainty, conflict, or hidden difficulty. Players stop when they have difficult choices to make, or they sense that something’s off.

This also boils down to what intuition really is. A chess grandmaster’s “gut feeling” isn’t the same as mine or yours, and it definitely isn’t a random hunch. That intuition is built from thousands of games, patterns, mistakes, and corrective feedback. A strong player can look at a position and instantly recognize danger or opportunity. This intuition is basically compressed experience.

“This is what distinguishes humans from machines: Humans can often recognize what’s good or what isn’t good from the situation. But if a person doesn’t manage to grasp the situation quickly, they find it difficult to continue computing the problem rationally,” says Sunde.

So When Should You Trust Your Intuition?

Life isn’t quite like a game of chess, but there are important lessons we can draw from this study.

There’s no clear map to when you should trust your gut, but a good starting point is to treat it like a chess problem. Is your gut feeling coming from something you have a lot of experience in? Is this an area you’ve actively tried to improve yourself, and you trust yourself? Are the patterns familiar to you?

If the answer is ‘yes’, then it might be a good idea to trust your intuition. You can’t calculate every possible outcome, just like chess players can’t calculate every possible move. But if the patterns repeat enough, you can know the best solution without truly calculating everything.

But intuition is context dependent.

A great chess player may have superb instincts on the board and poor instincts in the stock market. Or they may have better instincts in some types of positions, and weaker in others. Expertise doesn’t automatically transfer from one field to another.

Useful intuition says things like: “This is exactly the type of crisis we’ve faced before.” or “This negotiation feels off because the other side keeps changing the definition of success.”

Bad intuition says things like: “I just don’t like him.” or “This feels huge.” or “I’m sure it’ll work out.” or “Everyone else is excited, so I should be too.”

The best takeaway isn’t “go fast” or “go slow.” It’s recognizing the pattern and thinking about what kind of decision you’re facing.

Journal Reference: Uwe Sunde et al, Speed and quality of complex strategic decisions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2531472123