[kingludite]

A chess master will see the best move right away then spend his additional time further analyzing it.

First you have to ask yourself if you are sufficiently experienced with the topic. How many times have you seen this or a highly similar situation before? Did you guess then validate in those situations? If you consider it sufficient or are looking to acquire the intuition you invest the time guessing. After guessing you try to guess what accuracy you expect your guess to have. THEN you do the validation or analysis to see how well you did.

More often than not I'm almost completely wrong and I imagine my intuition to be highly accurate. It's very humbling. I learn not to depend on it.

I've seen others do much better to the point it looks like magic.

[muzani]

With chess, strategy is usually based on intuition, tactics is on analysis. The early game is mostly strategy, end game is mostly tactics.

It's hard to analyze early on. You have things where you sacrifice a pawn for a better position, or sacrifice a bishop for a bishop for seemingly no gain. It's difficult to even define a good position; your queen is in the center, able to threaten everywhere, but it faces threats from everywhere too.

This is where intuition kicks in. I know that I've had a lot of bad games letting enemy pawns in the center or with higher value pieces moved too aggressively early game. There's no analysis that can tell me why, but you develop it looking through your old games.