Seeing What is Generally Good

Someone once asked Reti how many moves he routinely calculated and he famously replied "none." That was hyperbole. Of course Reti was capable of calculating 10 or 15 moves when necessary, and Alekhine claimed he had occasionally calculated 20+. The point is, if you don't know whether the current position is good, you won't recognize whether a position is good 10 or 20 or 150 moves deep either.

GMs play by assessing positional features and trying to optimise them. Soviet players were drilled to memorize them and literally go through a mental check-list of them at every move of the game.

If you want to improve your game, stop trying to calculate deeper, and start memorizing Steinitz's list of positional features:

Permanent features:
1 material advantage
2 safe vs. vulnerable king position
3 passer(s) in the middle game
4 weak pawns
5 strong/weak squares
6 pawn islands
7 strong pawn centre
8 control of a diagonal
9 control of a file
10 control of a rank
11 bishop pair


Temporary features:
1 poor piece position
2 poor piece coordination
3 lead in development or retarded development
4 centralization of pieces
5 control of more space

strategy Originally posted by @eladar
When I first started playing people told me to put my pieces on good squares. I asked which were the good ones, the black or the white.

Originally posted by @moonbus
I recommend the following book:

Chess Strategy for Club Players, by Herman Grooten. It explains which squares are the 'good' ones. Also which pieces are poorly or strongly placed, and gives examples from master games demonstrating the list of Steinitz's elements.